


The Steps We Took, We Took Them Here

by stardustedknuckles



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Pre-Relationship, Temporary Angst, Temporary Blindness, Whump, heavy pain means lots of tender recovery, just sibling things: ethical catch 22s, liberal interpretations of magic and abilities, otherwise no set time, referenced brief character death, set pre-eiselcross, tactical brain frying, unreality recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28446072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustedknuckles/pseuds/stardustedknuckles
Summary: They found Beau and it's gonna be okay, but not immediately. Major whump, basically just a clump of excuses to treat Beau nicely after the first part. Relatively speaking.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha
Comments: 132
Kudos: 534





	1. Found

**Author's Note:**

> I am dealing with mounting touch starvation with whump and recovery, and unfortunately for Beau she's my favorite character.
> 
> I'm setting this up mostly as a place I can return to and spend some time writing in recovery as I feel like it. Nice to have a place to do that. I have an idea for the "story," but if it never comes that's okay too. You know she gets better.

It was the silence that worried the slim part of Beau's consciousness that was left to notice these sorts of things. She'd woken up on her own, which was weird enough - she had a hard time remembering the last time she'd opened her eyes without the chill of cold water or the wind kicked out of her ribs. She turned her head reflexively toward the direction of the bars of the cell she'd been in for…she wasn't sure. Weeks? Caleb would know.

But Caleb was dead. They all were.

Beau squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. Her friends _weren't_ dead. Nothing in this place was real. It had to have been an illusion.

She'd been here just long enough that she wasn't sure she believed it anymore, and yet her ears strained to catch more of the sounds above in spite of herself. Beau held her breath for the few seconds she was able in the attempt to hear over the rasp her lungs made. There was something happening, though whether it was good or bad or for whom remained to be seen.

And there was always the chance that this was a new trick.

Beau coughed, spasmed hard as whatever it was that had crept into her lungs protested. The shackles holding her arms above her head rattled with the motion of it.

When it was finally over, spots were exploding in the black that had been her vision for a while now and the taste of old blood in her mouth had some new blood in it. She didn't bother spitting it out.

She heard a sudden scream of rage from the direction of the dungeon door and her heart leapt before she could control it. It was probably a trap. Even if she could see, they would just be fucking with that too. That scream again, and then an unholy squealing of metal, and suddenly she could make out more sounds - notably metal on metal and "go and find her!"

Beau's pulse quickened and her breath started to seize. _No, no, no, not now._ She didn't know who was coming for her. She didn't know if it was to save her or kill her. She didn't even know if it was real. She struggled to stay conscious, to slow her breathing as she had been taught. But focused breathing required her to tune into her body, and that - she cried out in pain but her voice didn't make it out of her - that was the worst idea.

She heard rushed footsteps on the stone outside, drawing close to the main gate. A frustrated grunt that would be Yasha if she let herself believe it, and then an impact that startled her attempts at calm breathing and started another spasm. She dimly heard it again over the ringing building in her ears, and another as it presumably clattered to the ground.

"Beau!" The voice was close to Yasha's but they'd gotten it just wrong enough for her to see through it. Or hear, as it were. There was too much panic in it, too much fear. Her Yasha didn't sound like that.

The illusion raced towards her and stopped. "Beau?" And fuck them, because the ache in this impression was almost believable. Did they practice this shit in a mirror? "Beau, oh my gods. Can you hear me?"

Actually, she noticed it was getting harder. That was fine. Maybe if she died, they would leave her alone. She was so tired. Beau lifted sightless eyes to the vague direction of the voice and coughed once. "You're not real," she choked, and with the next cough came a wave of black.

* * *

On the other side of the bars, Yasha felt her heart stop. She didn't know what Beau had tried to say, but she knew just from the few seconds she'd seen her that time was almost up. Cold panic surged through her limbs, chased by the white rage that lent her the strength to _pull_ \- the cell door was of a poorer quality than the main gate and the hinges snapped with hardly a squeal of protest. Blood roaring in her ears, Yasha threw it away from her and rushed in to drop to her knees in front of Beau. She didn't think; she had seen how the monk's bruised and scored chest had gone still, the way her cough had trailed to nothing.

She took Beau's face carefully, desperately between her hands and poured her meager healing into her. "Wake up," she whispered. "Please."

A horrible moment passed, and then Beau convulsed with a hoarse cry, gasping for breath that still came labored and harsh but more readily than before.

"Beau," Yasha breathed. She reached a hand towards her face, and Beau flinched away at the touch, hard enough to smack her head on the wall.

"Fuck you," she spat, but her voice was choked and Yasha was alarmed to see tears pooling in her eyes. "Don't fucking touch me. I know it's not real."

"What?"

"You win," Beau said, her head hanging again. "They're dead. I believe you. Just stop."

Horror mounted in Yasha, but before she could formulate a reply she heard her name called and turned to see Jester pelting down the hall, Veth and Caleb on her heels.

"In here," she called, and a moment later Caleb's lights floated up and illuminated the halls and the cells as they skidded to a halt at the open cell and stared in shock. Veth broke ranks first and scrambled to begin picking the locks that held Beau upright by her wasted arms.

"Jester," she snapped, not unkindly.

"Right!" Jester knelt next to Yasha and reached for Beau, calling her name. Beau ignored them even as some of the shallower cuts and bruises began to fade. Tears fell quietly down her face.

"They did something to her," Yasha said as the lock popped on the first shackle. She reached up and caught Beau's arm gently, lowering it to her lap and supporting her weight as she slumped sideways. "She doesn't think we're real." Her voice almost cracked under the weight of it.

"Illusions," Caleb said from the door. He sounded shaken.

"Just stop," Beau said again. Her voice was a little clearer, but she was still staring at nothing. "I told you, I believe you. They're dead."

"Oh, Beau," Jester said softly. "We're not dead, we're here, I'm so sorry it took us so long to find you, there was -" she broke off as Beau began quietly sobbing. The second lock popped free and Yasha rose to catch her other arm. Beau tried to jerk away, but the attempt was feeble and she nearly crashed to the stone floor. Yasha caught her reflexively and sucked in a breath at the angry red lash marks visible across her back.

"What did they do to you?" she whispered.

Beau pushed herself off and curled into a trembling ball, shuddering all over. For the first time, it occurred to Yasha that they were in a basement somewhere under snow-covered lands. If she wasn't sweating in her winter clothes, Beau had to be freezing. She scrambled out of her cloak and draped it across the front of Beau, who flinched as the fur touched her but didn't try to take it off.

"I think she is blind," Caleb said softly. She knew he was right even as Beau shut her eyes tightly and turned her head away.

"Doesn't matter if I am or not," she snarled. "You've healed me, so fucking go on. I know the drill. Just drop the act." She lapsed into coughing as everyone searched for what to say. "You fucked up though," she added when she could talk again. "I was only holding on for them. If they're gone, then I don't give a fuck what you do and I swear to you I will die out of spite the first chance I get."

Jester's face was a mask of despair; even Veth looked cowed. Caleb looked very grim, and exhausted.

"Caleb," Yasha said. "She needs to sleep."

Beau's head snapped up, blinded eyes panicked. "No. I'm sorry. Please, don't." She tried to back away, but her movements were jerky and weak, and she sprawled onto the stone with a grunt before Yasha could catch her this time. Caleb raised a hand and uttered a strange word, and Beau stopped struggling with a final plea.

Caleb's face was ashen in the lights. "I hated that," he said quietly, "but I think she will stay asleep long after the spell fades."

Yasha barely heard him; she was already at Beau's side, gathering her limp and bruised body into her arms. She looked so much worse, this close. It made Yasha's breath catch in her throat. She spoke to Caleb. "Can you set up the tower here?"

He hesitated. "Ja, I can. But it only lasts 24 hours, and she will need several days of recovery, maybe weeks."

"Bring her to the Chateau," Jester whispered. "We can take care of her there." She didn't say that she also needed her mama right now, but it was all over her face.

"That's a good idea," Veth said gently, taking Jester's hand. "Let's go upstairs to the others and get out of here."

Yasha followed them up the steps, her eyes never once leaving Beau.


	2. Awake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beau wakes up. At least she's pretty sure she does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, recovery here we come! I wasn't gonna just leave the first part out here alone tonight.

Beau woke up to light for the first time in a long time - what felt like forever. It wasn't even actual light, just her eyes telling her there was something besides black outside of her body, but it was something. She wondered how many days they would take to heal fully and spent a few seconds simply opening and closing them to revel in the way she could tell the difference in the darknesses.

And then the pain hit.

It wasn't new pain - some part of her mind registered that this, too, was early recovery - but she had noticed it suddenly and now that it was here there was nothing else. She gritted her teeth and breathed as well as she could. Better, but not great.

Something stirred off to the side. "Beau?" She froze, lapsing into coughing just a moment later when holding her breath proved too much for her aching lungs. Fear and anger rose up in her, and she resented the return of them both. She was supposed to give up now - had given up, and here she was brought back from the brink again just so a bunch of wannabe cultists could play around with broken spells and think up new ways to generate misery in service of a god that showed exactly zero signs of being around anymore. "Beau, can you see me?"

Yasha's voice, a soft bed, no chains…gods there was a part of her that wanted to believe this all added up to something different. But though her resolve to fight apparently couldn't be doused that easily, the idea of allowing herself a single moment to hope that they'd been lying to her about her friends dying so that they could crush it again was unthinkable. This, she decided, was probably another mind game. She set her jaw and said nothing.

"That's a no, then," Yasha said softly. "Alright." She said it like she was trying not to sound sad, which was to say she did. "I brought you something," the voice continued. "Or Caleb did, mostly. It was his idea that maybe…the people who took you wouldn't know to trick you with this." Beau's curiosity rippled in spite of herself, chased by the loathing. She'd lost count of how many times she'd seen them die. Killed by each other, killed by her own unwilling body a few times just to shake things up. What could they possibly have now?

"It's going to feel like I'm touching you, but I'm not," said the voice, and then Beau's blankets stirred and depressed with a new weight next to her hip and a soft "mrow" came from it.

Beau's head turned almost of its own accord. The voice was right - they hadn't known about Frumpkin. How did they know now? She thought hard, trying to remember if there had been any mention of a familiar from her torturers. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that she'd missed it somehow, but if she started doubting her ability to overhear and collect information, she'd never find the end of that road.

This meant either they had updated their information, or her friends were alive.

Beau opened her hand and rested it against her thigh rather than extend it where anyone could see it shaking. She twitched when she felt something damp and small bump lightly against a finger, but a second later she had a handful of fur and warmth and low, familiar purr as Frumpkin shoved his head against her and rolled down into her touch and against the side of her leg.

"Oh gods," Beau whispered. The words scraped against the inside of her throat, dragged up a cough with them. Her ribs felt too tight, but she hardly cared. "Frumpkin, it's you." She tried to sit up, felt the way her body reached for strength that was nowhere to be found before informing her that wasn't happening.

She heard shifting from beside her, a kind of disturbance of her personal space that gave her the idea that Yasha was reaching for her but stopping short of touching her. "Please don't try to move, Beau." There was an anxiousness to her voice that again brought Beau's mind to war with itself. Accept that she was being long conned into more horrible things to come, or accept that Yasha was capable of sounding that broken up about her? It shouldn't have been that big of a deliberation, but it felt like life and death.

She curled her fingers into Frumpkin's soft, familiar fur and turned her eyes, useless at they were, to her bedside. "Yasha?"

"I'm here." She said it like Beau was about to make a simple request and not like she was hoping desperately that Beau would believe her now.

And that was important.

Beau swallowed. "I…I want to believe." Even that felt like too much, like she was admitting a weakness to be viscerally exploited. Frumpkin's paws began to knead the inside of her arm, tiny push-pulls with the barest scratch of claw.

"What would help you?" Yasha asked.

What a question. The obvious answer was touch - Beau hadn't hung around a bunch of magical shit for this long not to know that touch would solve the tricks she had been subjected to over and over. But touching Frumpkin was one thing, and with the majority of Beau's defenses shattered and rebuilt and shattered again over the last…however long it had been, just the thought of it made her shiver. Besides, it wasn't that touch didn't exist in their little scenarios. It did, in all forms, in all ways. It was just that she was reasonably certain she was awake right now, and that mattered too.

"Beau," said Yasha gently. "What can I do?"

She chickened out. "Tell me something only you would know." It wouldn't work, Beau knew it wouldn't, but with Frumpkin purring against her leg, there was absolutely no way she would survive reaching for Yasha only to find an unfamiliar body.

"I will," said Yasha. "But is there anything I could say that you would believe?"

"No."

"I see." She didn't ask anything else, but when she spoke, it wasn't a story like Beau had expected. "I'm sitting close to the bed," she said. "It's late afternoon, three days since we found you. We brought you to Nicodranas, and we're in the Lavish Chateau." A shuffling that might have been boots sliding. "There's carpet in here, which is...fancy, and I opened the window for you so you would be able to smell the sea. Caleb said," she hesitated. "He said that smell was nearly impossible to fake by magical means, because even the same smell is different for everyone."

"Yash," Beau managed, and she almost had to stop in surprise at how easily the nickname slipped from her. "Are you offering to let me sniff you?"

"If you thought it would help," said Yasha seriously. "Whatever you need."

Beau's free hand gripped the blanket over her just slightly. "I need to see you," she said. "I need to be able to run, fucking…sit up, something. I don't know how to make this right because -" she suppressed a cough, powered through the crack in her voice "- if there's the slightest chance I'm wrong and this was all a setup, I won't come back from that. "

Yasha's voice was quiet with a weight Beau couldn't quite parse. "Would it help to know you have already?"

Beau's voice came more strongly now than she'd heard it since…a while. "What." She heard Yasha inhale, sharp and slow. "Did I die?"

"Two days ago," Yasha said softly. Beau blinked into nothing, stunned. "I didn't want to tell you," she continued. "None of us did. Not that we weren't going to," she added quickly. "Just…not so soon. I just thought…"

Beau waited for a moment, feeling numb. "Tell me."

She felt the bed shift ever so slightly as Yasha's clothes rustled. "Caduceus said the soul has to be willing," she said. "And I just thought…if you had died, if you had known we weren't there, then maybe that's why you came back."

It felt like the kind of thing Beau should be able to remember, and it frustrated her to grasp for any sense of truth and find nothing. "What happened?" Yasha didn't answer. "Yasha?"

"I'm here," she said immediately. "I am just being very careful."

Beau was surprised to find she had the energy for irritation. Probably it was the pain. "If it's you, you should know I'm not gonna shatter on you." Her excellent point was undercut by the cough that shook her and left her feeling dizzy. She felt Frumpkin nuzzle against her hand again, focused on the rumble of him.

"You did shatter on me." Yasha's voice was hard with an edge of something Beau had glimpsed only rarely - a kind of defiance born of fear, or maybe grief. She sounded a little like Beau herself, actually. "But even besides. You -" she could almost see Yasha's hands lifting in that funny way she had, and there was something calming about the image. "I'm not going to tell you anything to try and convince you," she said finally. "I know what it is to not know your own mind, and I know how bad it can feel to have someone tell you how you should think of something you're not sure about. I don't want to sound like I'm influencing you."

It was the surest Beau had ever heard her sound when talking to Beau. Normally they tripped over words - their own and the others' - and generally sounded like a couple of idiots. Beau was too tired to dance, and not just with words.

She took a deep breath and tugged her hand away from Frumpkin to lay it palm up on the blanket. "Give me your hand."

She could almost feel Yasha's measuring look. "Beau…"

"Just give it to me," said Beau. "I'm still busted up and I can't breathe right, and if I'm going to be hurt again…" she hated the way her arm twitched involuntarily at the thought. "I told you, down in the prison. If you're gone, nothing matters. And if you're here, then I'm here." She flexed her fingers. "Please."

Silence for just a moment. "Okay," said Yasha finally. "I'm going to go slow."

The part of Beau that was terrified wanted to protest, to get it over with. The part of her that had been growing slowly over the past few minutes, that pinprick of hope she hadn't known was there, wanted to spend just those few moments longer alive in case it was going to be snuffed out again.

Beau felt the blanket depress close to her wrist and flinched away before gritting her teeth to roll it back over. Yasha was just allowing her to know when she was getting close. When the soft fabric moved again this time, Beau was ready and managed to keep her hand in place, though it trembled.

The first touch of Yasha's fingertips to the outside of Beau's palm felt like the ghost of a lightning strike - like Beau's mind had expected pain so much that the lack of it felt wrong. Yasha rested her fingers in the center and waited for a beat before sliding slowly around until she was cradling Beau's wrist. Beau felt her lean in, jumped when her hair fell forward and brushed her skin, and then she was there, hand pressed to Yasha's warm cheek. She guided Beau's hand to her ear, let her run shaky fingers over the metal cuffs and count them before gently offering one of her braids to feel, how the blue ribbon weaving through it contrasted with the texture of her hair.

"You didn't sound like yourself," Beau said. "In the dungeon. You sounded…scared."

Yasha rested Beau's fingers on her chin, touching where her blue stripe would be. "I was terrified."

Beau swallowed. "That's hard to imagine."

"That I care about you?" Beau trailed her fingers along Yasha's jaw until she found her ear again, touched the metal rings. Yasha let her. "We can talk more about it when you're better," she said softly. "I know I don't sound like myself."

"Yeah," said Beau. "You don't. But…I like it." Another cough pulsed through her, leaving her gasping. Yasha's hand held onto hers, squeezing just a little.

"I've got to get Caduceus," she murmured when Beau could breathe again. "Your wounds are opening back up."

Beau could feel the bandages on her torso growing warm and suspected that if she could see, her vision would be swimming. "Don't go."

Yasha hesitated but didn't let go. "We have to…I could carry you," she said. "But it's going to hurt."

"I don't care." Beau could hear the desperation under her voice, couldn't find it within herself to try and stop it. "As long as you're touching me, I know it's you."

"Okay," Yasha soothed. "I've got you. I won't let go." Beau felt something unclench inside of her and hoped fervently that it was metaphorical. "I’m going to touch you behind the neck," Yasha said. "Help you sit up."

Beau tried to nod and thought better of it. "Yeah."

"We need to get some food in you too, if you can stay awake." Beau winced but managed not to flinch - tried not to wonder if she was capable of flinching. She felt Yasha release her hand to pull back the blanket before gathering under her legs and lifting her with alarming ease.

Beau wondered for the first time how she must look. If it was a fraction as bad as she felt, it couldn't be good. Still, she could feel the breeze from here, held up like this, and the cough that came after she took a deep breath was worth it.

Even if she did pass out again.


	3. Doubt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's sure she's awake this time. She's not sure it matters. Those scores across her mind run deep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean technically they are being nice to her. She'll get there.

Beau woke restrained, and for a sleep-stupid moment, the world made sick sense again. Of course it had been one of their dreams. At least it had been a nice one.

As she'd very quickly learned to do, Beau stayed perfectly still and gave nothing of her waking away. They could usually tell - were usually the ones waking her - but every second she could catch them unaware of her consciousness was a small and pitiful victory.

But there was no sound but someone breathing slowly nearby. The surface under her was soft, she could feel something like a breeze, and only one of her arms was restrained. The pain was still old. Nothing had harmed her further.

It took Beau a long few seconds, sightless eyes still reflexively, uselessly straining at the ceiling, to piece together that the sensation of restraint was a hand warm in hers. Yasha was here, asleep next to the bed. The bed Beau was on, in the Chateau, away from the dungeon - and Yasha was _alive._

She hadn't felt her eyes welling up, had no vision to blur in warning before the tears fell silently and Beau realized she'd been holding her breath. Which she still couldn't really do, and so became a cough that resulted immediately in a tightening of the hand in hers.

"Beau?"

She said it immediately, like she'd woken needing to know Beau was there.

Voice cracked to hell and back, tears tracing down her face, Beau simply said, "Let me touch you."

Yasha moved with precious little of the slow caution earlier; the back of Beau's hand was pressed to her ear immediately so that Beau could touch the rings there. Beau sucked in a sharp breath, managed not to cough on the jerky exhale.

"Morning," she croaked, and though relief had become exhaustion before it ever had time to unspool within her, there was an echo of its potency in Yasha's short breath of a laugh.

"Almost."

Beau took slow, shallow inhales of the dewy air that comes with pre-dawn and tried to imagine how she'd never really noticed before, how good fresh air smelled. She hadn't really thought she'd get to smell it again, not with everyone gone. Killed. A hundred ways, a hundred times, Beau's memory and dreams the training ground for a warped kind of magic she didn't understand and probably never would. She tried not to think about it, focused hard instead on yesterday - was it yesterday? - the last time she'd been awake. It had been so easy then, to touch Yasha's earrings and know she was awake.

Now she felt awake in a more permanent way, like the lights had come back on in her mind and it was just waiting for something to defend against.

She heard Yasha shift, felt the bed depress slightly as her thoughts pulled back to the present for now. "Beau," Yasha whispered. "Can I…touch your face?"

There was a quiet need in her voice, and the fact of being here in the bed with the air that smelled like salt was all that allowed Beau to give a jerky nod. She couldn't stand the thought of Yasha seeing her cry, but she could stand even less the thought of denying her the same assurance she had provided - whether it held or not.

As before, Yasha pressed her fingers into the fabric to alert Beau of the direction she was coming from, and the sensation of her fingertips when they brushed Beau's damp cheek felt as light as the breeze cooling the tear tracks there. She could almost pretend she wasn't being touched at all.

And though she had to work to keep her body from shrinking away from Yasha, everything else inside of her longed to be touched, as though if she leaned in hard enough to softness it could beat back the tide of fearful memory and reflexive expectation.

Beau managed not to flinch as a gentle thumb dried her tears before steepling with Yasha's other fingers like butterflies at rest on her brow and cheekbone. She heard Yasha murmur something in the musical tones of Celestial that sounded like a prayer. Beau didn't chase their meaning, just let them wash over her as the darkness behind her eyes flared a soft red-orange before fading again.

Yasha's touch trailed up to tuck a piece of Beau's hair back behind her ear, and she realized for the first time that it was down. It also felt long on the sides; the breeze that touched her face couldn't reach her scalp.

Her skin prickled as Yasha's fingers dragged now over her dry lips to her jaw, and then with a final brush of the back of her hand withdrew entirely. Beau swallowed hard, squeezed Yasha's hand very lightly so she wouldn't have to find out how weak her grip really was.

"Was that okay?"

Beau didn't have an answer. It was everything. It was terrifying. They had done this many times, soft touching interspersed with or followed by a hard strike to someplace soft, and part of her wished a slap would come just to break the tension they'd sown in her.

She was losing herself, she realized, and there was no handhold in sight.

Her breathing had quickened, and now she felt Yasha gently tighten the grip that had never wavered from Beau's hand.

"Beau?"

"Are they all dead?" 

Yasha stilled, reply hesitant. "Are you talking to me or to them?"

Beau's voice came from far away. "I don't know."

This time when Yasha's ear was under her fingers, Beau pulled her other arm across her body to grasp at Yasha's. A choked whimper fell out of her when her fingertips touched bare skin where there should have been leather sleeve.

"What is it? What's - Beau." She could feel the callouses of Yasha's hands as they grasped her arm with a restrained urgency. "Beau, it's okay. We're in Nicodranas and it's warm here, look -" Beau's body felt cold all over. Her ears heard Yasha's words, but her mind was off in a hundred directions. She flinched when Yasha pulled her arm forward and then she was touching the unmistakable shape of the symbol Yasha wore around her waist.

She could feel Yasha's shirt underneath and overlapping the chain that held the symbol of the Storm Lord there, and Beau recognized that the worn material must be the shirt Yasha had worn early in their travels. With effort, she was able to grope and set her fingers on the braided straps up close to Yasha's throat and the wave of relief was so strong that Beau immediately pulled away, was already thinking of all the ways it could be falsified.

Deep breaths, she told herself.

She coughed.

Okay, slow breaths. Just be calm. The chances that her friend had been killed, that her shirt was her on the wrong body, were so fucking slim.

But they weren't zero, and more than that it was killing Beau to lose the reassurance she had gained from the earrings so quickly.

"What would help?" Yasha asked quietly, and Beau realized the conflict must have shown on her face.

She grunted in frustration, feeling exposed by the inability to use someone else's expression to gauge how much of her was showing. "You're saying all the right things."

Her hand moved with the straps as Yasha leaned forward, and Beau dropped her touch reluctantly. "What do you mean?"

She very nearly said it - Beau felt the words rushing up through her throat, the confession that she'd been dreaming for an embarrassing amount of time of Yasha treating her exactly as kind and worried for her as she was doing now. But it would give far, far too much away - to Yasha and her captors - so she just mumbled, "Getting the shit kicked out of me was so much simpler."

Yasha didn't reply right away, just lowered Beau's hand from her ear back onto the bed and held it there, stroking a thumb absentmindedly over her skin. Or maybe it wasn't absentminded. Beau literally had no way of knowing. She wanted it to be absentminded, was the trouble.

"Will you tell me what they knew about us?" There was a determination lacing Yasha's words that told Beau she was thinking, that there was something this was leading to. "I don't want information," she added when Beau didn't respond. "Just. If it turned out that I wasn't me, what would I know?"

Beau's mouth felt dry. "Everything I know."

She felt Yasha's hand tighten momentarily around hers, but her voice stayed exactly the same. "And I can't tell you anything new because I could be making it up."

"Yup. Great place to be." She turned her head in the vague direction of Yasha's face, unable to tell if either of them was looking at the other. Call it symbolic. "Could be making up all of this too." She lifted their joined hands.

A familiar chirp sounded from the foot of the bed, startling Beau but preparing her for the sudden pressure on her blankets as Frumpkin leaped up lightly. He began picking his way with purpose over Beau's legs to her stomach, his paws pressing heedlessly into fading bruises and sore muscle with each step. It hurt like a bitch, and she knew it surprised Yasha as much as herself when she exhaled something like a chuckle.

"Ow, you asshole." Frumpkin stuck his head demandingly under Beau's hand and rumbled as loud as he could while her fingers coaxed at his ear.

"I think I understand," Yasha said after a long moment of probably watching Beau pet Caleb's wizard cat. "You need us to…not change, just because you're hurt and we're worried about you?" The "we" in Yasha's statement brought with it a mote of reassurance. It was the kind of nuance her torturers never really grasped - they tended to stay very singular when they tried to pull shit like this.

Beau felt the grip on her hand loosen to hover over hers, palms skimming. "If you need me to stop, I will," Yasha continued. "But you should know that I don't want to. I won't say any more than that. It's just - fact."

Beau spent one full second weighing the improbability of a real Yasha who cared for her against the near-emptiness of her hand. There was really no contest.

She wrapped her fingers carefully around Yasha's hand and gripped it close as she struggled to extricate a single word from the pile she had almost coughed up. It scraped against her throat and tumbled free like a half digested pile of nettles. "Stay."

Yasha's fingertips rested lightly on the back of her hand. "Are you sure?"

Beau huffed. "No. But I got nothin to lose. Shitty place to start, but…I kinda thought I'd die in there, so I'll take any start, you know." There it was again, something like a weakness trying to pull its way out of her and offer itself up to Yasha.

Now Yasha's grip solidified into something firm enough to anchor her. "Yes," she said. "I know exactly what you mean."

Beau frowned. "You kinda thought I'd die in there too?" That was a disconcerting and strange thought, Yasha getting lost in her own head about what might be happening to Beau. She didn't know whether to feel offended or very fucking pleased, but she definitely knew which one was easier right now. At least, she realized, she was thinking of Yasha as Yasha. Maybe this unreality bullshit came like, in waves. It'd be nice, having some time now and then where she wasn't convinced she was still in a glorified hole in the ground with no friends.

Beau was pretty sure Yasha had been about to say something in reply when there came a light knock at the door. Beau's pulse fluttered, but she was able to breathe through it. Knocking wasn't really connected to anything especially bad - apparently it wasn't a thing cultists did a lot of.

Also there hadn't been many solid doors. Big fans of bars, those guys.

"It's just me," Caduceus said from the other side. "Everyone's back now, I'm just checking on you on the way down."

"Later," Yasha promised to Beau, then, "I can let him in if you want, but I did lock the door, so…"

Now Beau did huff a quiet laugh in spite of herself. "You locked out Caduceus?"

"Well…" Beau could hear her rub awkwardly at the back of her neck. "I don't know, I thought you might like it if nobody else could come in suddenly."

Beau's heart did something funny at that, and Frumpkin butted insistently against fingers Beau hadn't realized she'd stopped rubbing on his fur. "That's…really sweet, Yash." She resumed petting. "You can let him in though."

"Okay." She let go of Beau's hand gently. "I'll be right back."

Beau flexed her empty fingers thoughtfully as Yasha crossed the carpet - was she making extra noise on purpose? - and snapped the lock open. It occurred to Beau that she was blind, that Yasha had known she wouldn't be able to see the door at all and had locked it anyway. It felt like a lot, suddenly.

"Good morning." Caduceus's voice, unmuffled by the door, was warm and genial in a way that had Beau feeling ready to cry for reasons she didn't want to dig into just yet.

"Hey Ducey," she said.

"Oh, good morning, Beau!" If anything the warmth deepened. "It's good to see you awake." She realized he must have meant the first greeting for Yasha and felt her face heat up.

"Yeah," she mumbled. "Good to see you too. Or it would be."

"Ah," he said gently. "I was rather hoping that had worked itself out." He sounded closer now, and she imagined she could feel the air blocked in the general place he was standing.

"Nope." She popped the "p" in a mockery of cheerfulness. "I got super special blindness."

Caduceus made a hmm noise she didn't know what to do with. "You look otherwise well," he said. "Has your sight improved at all?"

Beau opened her mouth to answer and instead of an answer, she found every alarm in her mind screaming to keep what few secrets she had. It was powerful. One moment, she was fine here with Yasha and Caduceus, and with a simple question from a godsdamned healer doing his job, - her _friend_ \- she was thrown sideways.

She worked her voice, tried to get a sound out, but she was lost again in the pattern that had been set up for her over the last few weeks. How many times had one of them asked after her? How many times had she sunk into the idea of kindness and answered, only to be stabbed or punched or worse? She desperately didn't want to be hurt again, tried to push away the memory that wasn't a memory of that placidly smiling face standing over her as she choked under his staff. How many more -

Frumpkin's yowl cut through Beau's thoughts like a knife, shattering the memory into dust and snapping her back to the present. The pinprick pinch of his small teeth on her arm was her first indication she had moved them at all. He let go of her and rasped his rough tongue on her chin until she pulled back. She was curled up, she realized, shivering and with her pillow damp under her cheek. Something that wasn't Frumpkin was touching her back and she nearly screamed, but it was so startlingly soft and slow that the impulse died in her throat.

Frumpkin continued rumbling and kneading while Beau stayed frozen, the gears of her mind practically squealing as they worked themselves back to life.

The benefit to being a hardass shitheel of a person, she realized, was that to an outside observer, she tolerated only the most perfunctory of touches. And they may have been in her head, but they were _still_ outside observers. None of them had ever tried rubbing her back like a fucking child. It wouldn't have occurred to them. Wouldn't have occurred to _her_.

She hated that it was working, hated more the way she could hear Yasha now as she spoke to her in Celestial. Beau took a deep and shuddering breath, pulling her thoughts in the way she'd been taught and trying to force her mind into calm. She wanted to know what Yasha was saying, anything to keep from going down the path of reasons why this wasn't real.

Her body was a wreck and her ki was slow to rouse in response, but a mix of habit and the memory of strength let Beau extend her awareness outside of herself, moving slowly like a ripple that she drew in and cast out wider and wider until it radiated from the center of her to Yasha's hand on her back. It was all she needed - a silver thread pulled taut and Beau could hear words where there had been a strange chiming sort of melody before.

It took Beau a moment even with the translating to understand what was being communicated, because it didn't feel like words. Yasha's voice reached her like…like impressions of wonder, like the feeling of a clear pond on a hot day, like lightning flickering outside of a warm room, like staring hard at the veins of a leaf before considering how many millions of them were everywhere.

It was new and it was foreign and it was without a doubt something that did not exist in her memory to be exploited. Her mind gathered the melody and absorbed it, and after a moment of confusion Beau realized what she was hearing. This jumble of peace and raw energy and sunlight...it was Yasha's name for her, calling her over and over like an actual _Calling_ she was helpless to ignore.

Beau retreated from the feeling and let her mind empty again, feeling somehow charged. Cobwebs had been blown from her mind, and she reached back one trembling hand to grasp the inside of Yasha's arm at the elbow. Yasha halted immediately and said, in common, "I'm sorry, I didn't know what to do. Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Beau managed. And when she realized the question had bounced off of her entirely without repercussion, "Yeah. I think…" she swallowed, wiped the heel of a shaky hand across her cheek. "I think I have an idea. Caduceus?"

"I'm…here." He sounded unsure of himself, which tended only to happen when he was having a personal crisis or the world was threatening to end. Beau felt distantly bad and resolved to apologize properly later. "Ask me again about seeing, but this time in Giant."

"Huh," said Caduceus, and the next words that came from him seemed to hit Beau's ears in one language and her mind in another. "Is your sight better?"

Beau smiled a real smile for the first time in a long time and rolled onto her back without letting go of Yasha's arm. "I can tell when there's light," she said. "I think that's an improvement."

She heard him inhale, exhale. "That's good," he said, still in Giant. "I've been healing them a little every day. Would it be okay if I…?"

Beau let go of Frumpkin to extend her free hand and said, almost sincerely, "Put 'er there."

She still jerked when the warm, soft hand engulfed hers, but it was a start where there hadn't been one before.


	4. Confessed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has to tell them the details eventually. Waking up in horrible, fresh pain seems as good a time as any.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is difficult to keep momentum going in a long-form hurt/comfort fic. Too long wearing on the same nerve starts to feel numb. Enjoy this, and we'll see what dips come from what is now a recovery in full swing.

When Caduceus killed her this time, it was with the glove of blasting.

There was a sense of relief somewhere in the image, Beau noted. Without those fuckers here to design her own personal hellscape, details were getting confused. Maybe that's what healing from this looked like - dying by the wrong mechanics.

But it was a cold comfort as Beau woke to darkness and sweat and panic she couldn't rationalize. Her body burned, locked in place she tried to fight her instinct to stay still. Her hand twitched, but it wasn't enough to alert Yasha - if she was there at all. She felt a rusty pang go through her chest and fought harder. If she could just cough, or use her throat…Beau held her breath against the burning sensation traveling all along the tops of her thighs and her stomach, and finally -

"Beau!" Yasha's voice, and relief poured through Beau at the sound as she coughed and worked to push herself up into a sitting position. "Beau, are you okay?"

She fought a whimper and grasped for the blanket with numb fingers, trying to push it away, get it off of her skin, find cool air.

"Okay, it's okay, I can get it off for you - oh my gods." Beau panted harshly, still unable to speak yet but heart sinking as she heard the horror in Yasha's voice. She wanted to touch the burns she knew were there but she didn't dare. She didn't want to touch them at all, actually, she wanted to fucking see them, but they'd taken her sight and everything hurt.

"Beau. Beau, it's okay. Beau." She felt the shift in Yasha's words, the switch to Celestial as she called her name again, but Beau couldn't make the words work. She already knew she wasn't dreaming. She just couldn't bear the pain.

"Caduceus," she choked, and whether she was calling for him or trying to explain even she wasn't certain. But she knew how Yasha would take it and just managed to nod when Yasha pressed down on the bed next to her and said, "I'm going to get him. Thirty seconds."

It struck Beau as she heard Yasha cross the carpet and snap the lock on the door that something was off about the whole interaction. Yasha had seen something on her, she knew it. The burns were real. But Yasha hadn't reacted with confusion, only something like dread.

She felt the whispers coming up, the drag of unreality, and she shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. This was real. Yasha had seen something bad enough to get Caduceus and she wasn't confused.

It came together for her in the instant before she heard them hurry back into the room.

Caduceus wasted no time, and his voice had the same lack of a question in it. "Beau," he said in Giant. She could hear him trying to be gentle, but it wasn't a language that lent itself to softness. "I need to touch you," he said. "Just for a moment. Right thigh."

She nodded, breath hitching, and fully realized for the first time that she was crying and crying hard. Fuck, everything about this ordeal was bullshit. No sight, no dignity, just pain and emotional ruin and a feeling of rawness from the inside out.

She flinched when Caduceus's soft hand rested on her thigh, but a moment later she felt a cool, soothing ripple extend from his palm and over her skin. It was a relief like she'd never known, not like that, and she slumped from the rigid posture she hadn't known she was maintaining until it was over.

Hands were there to catch her as she listed sideways, gasping for air - Yasha's, because they weren't Caduceus's and she could smell the shirt she was being cradled against.

"I just don't understand," she heard Caduceus say to Yasha. He sounded perplexed, almost plaintive. He was speaking in common now, which meant all of the inflections were his own.

"It's the same as before," Yasha said softly. "Only last time..."

"I know. Beau," he said, in Giant again now. "Are you feeling better?"

Her trembling was minimal now, her breath coming easier. She didn't feel in danger of coughing, and Yasha's shirt was a soft reassurance on her cheek as she nodded. "Y-you -" She broke off, gritted her teeth.

"It's alright," Caduceus said. "Take your time."

She worked to take deeper, more measured breaths, taking care to feel out how much of her lungs she could expand before she felt the threat of a cough. Distant surprise - she could almost take a whole, deep breath.

One of Yasha's hands was wrapped around Beau's elbow, and it began to drift up and down her arm as Yasha shifted to sit fully on the bed. "Is this okay?"

Beau nodded, feeling stronger. One more deep breath, one more after that, and now she could try speaking. "You've seen this before," she managed. "I. I died in my sleep, didn't I?"

An excruciating second of silence in which she imagined the two of them exchanging a glance, and then it was Yasha who answered. "Yes. You were just sleeping, and then…you started bleeding, there were these wounds, and. Then you weren't breathing anymore."

"Nothing attacked you," Caduceus said quietly. "Nobody was in the room but Yasha."

Beau waited for him to finish and shrank closer to Yasha. She felt stupid and ashamed and angry for both of those feelings. None of this was her fault, so why did it feel like such a big fucking deal to speak up? "Something did," she said. "But you can't see it. It's not real." The last part was the hardest to say. Could something still be unreal if it left real marks?

She felt Yasha stiffen and knew Caduceus was probably doing the same.

"What did they do?" Yasha whispered.

She filed away the sorrow in Yasha's voice to revisit another time - and she would - and forced herself to keep going. "I don't know exactly. But…dreams hurt. Like reality."

"I don't understand," said Caduceus. "I'm sorry," he added gently when Beau's jaw flexed. "Would it help if I brought Caleb in?"

Caleb. Gods, they had loved to use him. For everything. Masterminding, executing, whispering in her ear all of the different ways he could think to use his spells to hurt her. The accent had been perfect. He had been the last to die, a particularly detailed dream in which she had been rescued and he had been killed as they were escaping.

"Beau," Yasha called softly, and she realized she was shaking again.

"F-Frumpkin," she managed. "Let me tell Frumpkin." She could not hear Caleb right now. She would lose her grip at the first sound of his voice, and she strongly suspected that it wouldn't matter what language he spoke in.

"I will tell him," Caduceus said, and if he was confused about Beau's unwillingness to accept Caleb himself, he did not press. "Wait here."

Beau relaxed into Yasha's arms and heard the soft noise of surprise or sadness she made as her arms tightened and released. "You feel cold," she murmured, and when Beau processed her words she realized that she was, actually. Her whole body felt wrong. Ill-equipped somehow to keep her up to speed with her environment.

Also it occurred to her for the first time that she could feel air in some weird places. She lifted a shaky hand and touched it to her own arm, startled at the lack of wraps and again by the rough and indented skin at her wrists. The shackles, she realized, and pulled her hand back quickly.

A quick pass over her body told her she was in her undershorts, an unfamiliar breastband, and nothing else.

"Yeah okay," she said. "I probably am cold."

"Do you…I could lay you back down, if you want."

Beau hesitated, considered her body. She was still leaned at something of an awkward angle, and Yasha felt like she might be too. But she very much wanted to keep those arms around her - a hand didn't feel like nearly enough to drive away the feelings clawing up from deep inside.

"Will you hold me?"

"Of course." She couldn't be sure, but Beau thought Yasha might sound relieved. The hands that drew her into that broad, warm lap were still gentle but more sure of themselves, and rather than make Beau anxious she found security in the way they held her close against Yasha's chest.

"Okay?"

Beau nodded and pressed closer, and a moment later the blanket was loosed from where it was tucked under the mattress to drape over Beau and hold in their heat.

They sat in silence, Beau content to listen to the wet throb of Yasha's heart under her skin. She missed her sight, felt cheated at being held like this and unable to see what Yasha was thinking. It was easier to focus on trying to imagine Yasha's face than what had just happened, but she didn't have long to ponder before she heard Caduceus return.

"Alright," he said. "Caleb's watching. He said to tell you he will stop if you ask him to."

Frumpkin chirped and leapt lightly onto the bed, and even though Beau knew it wasn't technically Frumpkin she was interacting with, she held her hand out and smiled when he butted against it with a soothing rumble. She felt him turn in a circle on the blanket covering her, until finally his warm weight settled with his paws resting on the inside of Beau's foot.

"I think he is ready," Yasha said, and Beau felt her reach to scratch him for a moment before returning her arm to Beau's lap.

Beau took a deep breath and tried to calm her thoughts. How many days had it been? How bad did she look? How much weight had she lost? How long would it be before she was fit to do anything? What if her sight didn't come back?

She exhaled and set the thoughts aside as best she could, promising them a return another time and gathering her information. "I don't know what they did exactly," she began. "But it feels maybe important that they fucking sucked at magic at first. Like…like they were learning on me." She thought back to those first days, where they took turns between casting bullshit at her and hitting her the god old fashioned way. It was startling to think of those as the good times, but comparatively it was true.

"They were seeing what they could do to make the spells change," she said. "Last longer or do different things - they just kept blinding me one day and I didn't know why. Just hours of it. I don't know where they got the energy for it, but it -" she broke off, felt Yasha stroke her thumb over the skin of Beau's knee where it rested under the blanket.

"Eventually it stopped fading as quickly, and then it didn't fade anymore. That was day six." She felt her lips twitch in some profane echo of pride. "I could still keep count then."

"You were brave, Beau," Yasha murmured. In Celestial: "I'm proud of you."

Beau pressed her ear gently against Yasha's chest in acknowledgment and kept going. "They didn't let me sleep after that, but they could make me see things when I was awake and…they." She swallowed, fighting the rising sense of vulnerability and shame. "They could control my dreams too. And when you hurt me, dream you -" it felt important to make that distinction now of all times - "they made it happen for real. I…" How many times had she been cut, burned, choked, electrified, brought to the brink only to be healed and start all over?

"You said your dreams hurt," Caduceus prompted gently. "You're so close, Beau. You're doing well. Tell me again what you said."

Almost there. She just had to cough this up, and then Caleb - real Caleb, her Caleb, her brother - would help her. And even if he couldn't, she never had to say it again. "I couldn't tell what was real anymore," she whispered. "And somehow…like the way the blindness won't go away yet. I'm still getting hurt by my dreams. Even with nobody there to cause it directly."

Frumpkin growled, a low and feral sound that Beau was able to interpret for the comfort it was. "Yeah," she said softly. "It's not just that reality is so hard to hold onto. There's literally no difference for me. And they made you do it to me." She'd started shaking again and wasn't sure when. She did know it had nothing to do with being cold, and there wasn't enough energy in her to be embarrassed. "And to each other," she added. "Sometimes they would. You guys rescued me so many times and I -"

"Beau," Yasha breathed, low and broken.

"And I kept waking up," Beau insisted. "Something new every time. They wanted my memories, more information to use. And I couldn't stop them, not at the end." She sniffed, burrowed closer to Yasha. "That's why I couldn't believe you were real," she whispered. "And why I'm waking up hurt. I don't know what they did, but it's taking too long to go away."

She heard Caduceus shift, likely for her benefit. "Is it getting better at all? Like your sight?"

Beau choked a laugh without humor, nearing the end of her ability to handle it all. "Sure," she said. "This time you used the wrong spells on me. The burns you left weren't as bad. I guess that's better." She spat the last word with a venom meant to draw him out if he wasn't real. They never took kindly to her telling them to fuck off - what little power she had often lay in provoking them into attacking her early.

But all she heard was a quiet, "I see," and then, presumably to Caleb, "will that be enough to help you fix this?"

She felt the blanket over her legs depress as Frumpkin climbed up, and then his front paws moved to Beau's chest. He sniffed lightly at Beau's chin, letting her know he was there, and then he pressed his head up under her jaw and just held it there, purring beside her ear. Extremely un-catlike. Very Caleb.

"Yeah, yeah," Beau said softly. Something sharp had risen inside of her, and with nothing more being asked of her it was still deciding whether to dissipate or to spill over. "Put that brain to work so mine will let me talk to you, yeah?" She didn't kiss Frumpkin's furry head so much as touch her nose to it, but he bumped gently against her and dropped to her lap before stepping away.

Maybe it was magic too, somehow, that wound her up whenever she talked about the things that had happened. She'd seen a lot of shit, so to speak - it was suspect that this was tripping her up so hard.

A quiet part of her whispered that there was probably nothing magical about the inability to look straight at it. She ignored it.

"Beau?" Yasha's voice was calm in the intentional way, which meant Beau was doing something to alarm her.

Beau breathed in deeply through her nose and closed her eyes to take stock of herself. Her heart was pounding, her hands trembling, and the way she had to manually drop her jaw and relax her forehead told her she must have been more tense than she realized. It was amazing how much of what her body seemed to do naturally apparently relied on sight.

"I think I'm okay."

"It's alright if you're not," said Yasha.

"Thanks. Duces?"

"Still here."

"Sorry for…testing you."

She heard him rise, but not towards her. "It's quite alright," he said. "On another topic, we've been giving you a boba to keep you from losing any more weight or missing out on something vital. Would you like me to make you something tangible?"

Beau didn't have to think about that one. "I can't think of anything else I would rather have than real food."

"Is there anything specific you want, or anything I shouldn't make?"

The second question confused her momentarily. Why would - oh. "You don't have to worry about that," she said. She felt a muscle flex in Yasha's arm, but neither of them asked her to elaborate. She rushed to think of something that sounded good, but everything she tried to recall felt distant, like someone else had eaten them once and described it to her.

She realized she was taking too long, felt herself flush as she tried to push the topic away from how fucked up her days had been. They'd done enough dwelling on that. "Everything you make is good," Beau said. "But I definitely want meat."

She heard Caduceus chuckle as he turned away. "I was taking that as a given, don't worry."

A few seconds later, the door shut and left the room feeling quiet and empty. This was partially to do with Yasha - she was tense and motionless in comparison to the minute sort of movements she made to adjust her grip, stroke Beau's arm, shift her weight.

"Yasha?"

"I'm here."

Beau tried for a smile and patted the arm resting over her lap. "I know you are. Getting better, remember?"

She felt Yasha's body unlock by degrees, until she was leaning almost on top of Beau's back and resting her chin on Beau's head. "Nothing could have made me leave you once we got here," she said softly. "But I very much wish I could have gone with the others just to really savor tearing through those -" she stopped herself. "Sorry," she said. "I probably shouldn't talk much about that, in case…they used me too, didn't they? You said all of us."

Beau swallowed, for all the good it did. "Yeah. Some more than others."

Yasha's voice was infinitely tender. "Caleb?"

She could only nod, reached up cautiously over her head to find the side of Yasha's face without putting a finger in the wrong spot. All she needed was to jab her in the eye by mistake. She made it, and Yasha leaned in and sighed through her nose. She turned her head into Beau's palm and kissed it gently before turning back like nothing had happened.

Part of Beau wanted to ask her if she'd felt that correctly, and part of her didn't want to speak it aloud - just hold it close and let it warm her. She compromised, held it close and asked something else.

"Would you help me take a bath?"

A pause. "You mean like in a tub?"

"Yeah. Someone's probably been using a rag and that's nice, but I feel like I need a week just to sit in hot water and wash off everything." She slid her hand from Yasha's face to her own hair, ran her fingers over the place where short became long, winced at the soreness still radiating through her. Everything still fucking hurt and would for a while, but it was now at least the kind of hurt that she could feel all of. Which shouldn't have been much of a comfort, but it was the full-body equivalent of burning her mouth on a hot piece of steak versus touching something so hot that it felt cold.

The pain was back within measuring range, in other words - she could grasp the sum of it now.

It was still a big sum.

Beau pushed the thought aside, kept her voice light. "A haircut too, maybe? Just. Whenever."

"Of course." Yasha sounded a little uncertain. "That's a lot of touching. Are you going to be okay?"

It was a fair question. "Maybe we don't do both at the same time," she suggested. "But I do feel like…maybe there are parts of the day when I have energy again, and those aren't so hard to deal with." She smiled so Yasha would hear it. "That's the power of boba."

She was rewarded with Yasha's quietly amused huff. "What is that thing people say about great things and small packages?"

"That they're named Beau?"

This got a real laugh from Yasha, and if part of it was from relief she wasn't complaining. Yasha hugged her, which felt different from the light squeezes of affirmation and made Beau feel a little lightheaded in a way that was hard to know whether to pin on slow recovery or general dumbassery. Either way, she didn't mind.

"Did you want the bath now?" Yasha asked. "Caduceus is using a real kitchen here, so it might be a while. Or we could just sit here, or anything you want."

"I want to run three miles and climb a tree," Beau said. "But in lieu of that I guess a bath is fine."

"We'll get you there," Yasha murmured. "One step at a time." She started to pull them towards the edge of the bed, moving her arms to better brace Beau for lifting.

Beau did her best to help, sighing. "Yeah. I'm great at that."

Yasha's weight disappeared off the side of the bed, then: "Slow or all at once?"

"Just gently."

"Okay."

Beau would have loved it, honestly, if her body had consulted her before throwing a fit. The problem was the bed disappearing from under her; she hadn't realized how much the soft presence of it was doing the heavy lifting for her thought processes.

In the same instant the tiny, reflexive whine fell out of her, Beau's head hit Yasha's shoulder and she made a choked little noise as the silver lining of the whole scenario unwound from the cloud to clothesline her. No matter how elaborately they'd fucked around in her head, no matter what they'd made her see and think she felt, none of the times Beau had been picked up had been real. They'd been effortless sweeps with little in the way of actual detail for how it felt to be carried, like moments out of a fucking romance novel. That was the bitch of dreams, never enough detail and the dreamer too out of it to notice.

But Beau was hyperaware of every detail of this, largely because it - well, kinda sucked in a lot of ways. Without the ability to see and orient herself, she was trying to compensate where didn't have to, her chin smacked gracelessly against Yasha's shoulder, she wound up with hair in her mouth…oh and she was deeply fucking embarrassed. Definitely not a dream detail.

"Are you still with me?" Yasha's voice was slightly strained.

She was, in spite of the disorientation. "Still here."

"Good," said Yasha. "You are going to have to stop wiggling."

Beau stopped wiggling. The world felt off-kilter, so she shut her eyes. It felt more like she was choosing the dark this way, and she felt immediately steadier. "Sorry," she mumbled.

Yasha shifted her gingerly as she crossed the room. "You don't have to apologize. I was just worried I would have to actually grab you instead of…" she jostled Beau gently in demonstration. "Arm…shelf."

Beau spit some more hair out. "I think I'll feel better if you hold on, actually. And as reality tests go, I definitely never dreamed anyone saying 'arm shelf.'"

Yasha's grip shifted to actually hold Beau, and the sense of precariousness faded entirely. "Neither have I," she said seriously. Beau laughed a little into her shoulder and wished she could see if Yasha was smiling. She liked to think so.

Beau hadn't been conscious enough to register Yasha carrying her last time, and now that she was stable she mentally added it to the list of things that were fucking weird without sight. She was so caught up in thinking about the difference between eyes open and shut that the transition of footsteps on carpet to stone startled her. "Wait, where are we?"

Yasha stopped immediately. "There's a big bath in this room. We don't have to go down to the big ones."

Beau relaxed, remembering seeing such rooms on their tour of the Chateau. "Huh. Fancy." It hit her then, which rooms those had been. "Hang on. Seaside view, fancy carpet, big bed, and a bath?" She turned her head up to Yasha, more for effect than anything. "Are we in a honeymoon suite?"

She would have given anything to be able to see Yasha right at that moment. "We thought it would be best because it's big, and - someone could help out you know, and nobody can hear outside of it."

"Because it is built for sex."

Yasha did not tell her she was blushing. Beau could hear it in her voice. "I didn't think to explain, I can sit on the outside of it if -"

"Yasha." Beau reached for her shoulder, managed not to hit her in the jaw. "I can think of literally nothing worse than being blind right now, but it is also the reason I can say this with a straight face. Please feel free to join me in the sex tub."

"Yeah," Yasha managed. "Okay."

"Jester's idea, right?" Beau heard the timbre of her voice change as they stepped further into the stone room. It felt warm, nothing like the stone of the dungeon, and her thoughts remained intact.

"Marion's insistence, actually." Yasha knelt and set her carefully on a bench. "Jester was too worried to make jokes."

Beau blinked and lifted her arms to let Yasha work off the breastband. "Damn. That bad, huh."

Yasha's fingers grazed Beau's skin as she pulled the material away, sending shivers through Beau. "You have no idea," she said softly. She started to work gently at a bandage on Beau's back, tugging at it with slow, sure fingers. 

Yasha's words sobered Beau up. "I want to talk to everyone," she said. "Maybe not today, but soon." Though the immediate fear that struck her was clearly reflex, she found she needed to ask. "They're all here, right? Everyone's okay?"

"Yes," Yasha assured immediately. "Everyone but me and Caduceus went back to get more information and your things back, but they're here and staying now."

Beau relaxed and realized that must have been what Yasha was referring to when she mentioned wishing she could have gone with the others. Something flared hot and bright in her blood at the thought of Yasha passing up the chance to go with them to stay for her. It was a good feeling, but as it faded Beau could feel shame creeping in and said nothing as she tried to help Yasha get her undershorts off with no ability to tell whether she was contributing.

She stayed quiet as she heard Yasha taking off her own clothes, looked up out of habit when Yasha called her name softly.

"Do you want me to bring in anything? In case you need to touch?"

Beau ducked her head again, jumped at the feeling of Yasha's fingers gentle under her chin. "Beau?"

"M'fine," she muttered. "Just feeling ridiculous."

"You're not," Yasha said gently. "You're alive and you're healing and you're letting me help you."

Beau didn't reply, more from helplessness than stubbornness.

Yasha seemed to understand. "I'll bring my symbol just in case."

Beau scratched at her too-long hair and inhaled. "Yeah. Just in case, I guess." Exhale. "Let's take a fuckin' bath."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuckin' bath up next.
> 
> I am pulling the magic mechanics from nowhere on my own terms - canon and I have a loose acquaintanceship at best.
> 
> Also I promise I don't hate fjord, I'll tag him when he eventually shows up lol.


	5. Bonds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are always fine until they aren't. That's how it goes. But good things can look an awful lot like bad things.

There was some small, odd comfort in the thought that if she lost it again, this time she'd smell like tree sap.

Not that she was feeling particularly close to losing it. Beau had to admit - even as banged-up as she still felt, Yasha's hands on her in the hot water of the tub were the first truly good things she'd felt since she'd been taken.

The water chased the gross feeling from her skin, and the rag in Yasha's hand pressed at her muscles, and sometimes they jointly discovered something tender but mostly Beau was content. She had her eyes closed again, because this way it felt like maybe something they had decided to do together for fun instead of being essentially nursed back to health by the one person Beau would have paid any sum to avoid seeing her beaten down and broken.

She didn't know what she would have guessed Yasha's reaction to be, if she'd been asked - what she might have been scared of. Before all of this shit, she might have said that the very same care Yasha was taking with her was the thing that frightened her. And it still did, but now Beau had long list of instances in which Yasha had told her she was worthless before stabbing her on purpose. Real or not, the experiences tended to put things in perspective. If bath time and palm kisses were a dream…they weren't, she told herself. Best not to think that way.

The rag ran slowly from her tailbone up to her neck, and Beau shivered. Some part of her was distantly pleased to be horny in spite of everything - it was nice to know her internal priorities. They broke her mind, arguably her spirit, but the body just kept on trucking.

The point was, she had definitely had this dream long before people started messing with her head.

"All done with the back," Yasha said softly. "How are you doing?"

Beau had listed into a kind of lean forwards as Yasha worked, and she winced as she sat up and rolled her shoulders experimentally. "Good, but fuck. I think my _blood_ is bruised."

She gripped Yasha's arm and managed to get herself turned around to face the rough direction she estimated her to be in. "You are kind of one big bruise," Yasha agreed, and there was a trace of amusement in there. The water moved a little as Yasha adjusted whatever final inches Beau had miscalculated.

"But like a sexy bruise, right?" There was a pause, during which it suddenly clicked for Beau that she'd given Yasha free reign to wash her tits. Gods, Yasha probably thought she'd planned that.

Gods, she kind of wished she had.

"You make a beautiful bruise," Yasha said finally. She was smiling, but Beau could hear her a kind of strain in her voice and wondered if she had come to the same realization.

She swallowed. "Damn right."

She heard Yasha's quiet laugh, but she made no move to start on Beau's front. Her voice sobered. "Is there anything I shouldn't do?" 

She was uneasy, Beau realized. Of course. She'd been sitting here with horny pain brain, and all Yasha wanted was to make sure she didn't scare her. Because she was a literal angel.

Even though Beau wasn't struggling particularly hard with reality right now, there was a reflexive relief. The Yasha they had come up with had always known precisely what button to press to get her to relax, was content to take the lead. It occurred to Beau for the first time to maybe question how easily she fell for it over and over.

And aside from that contrast, Yasha's uncertainty now was just plain charming, which was as disarming as always - and probably most of the reason why Beau's clever response was, "I like that you're nervous."

Only the knowledge that punching herself in the face would be embarrassingly pathetic as attempts go prevented Beau from trying it immediately.

Yasha stammered a little. "Um, okay, that's probably good. I can do nervous."

"It's great," Beau assured, though her voice was in an octave she was not wholly acquainted with. "Besides, most people get nervous seeing me naked."

"Oh gods." The embarrassment and affection in Yasha's words made Beau grin in spite of herself. "I feel like I should tell you I'm blushing since you can't see it."

Beau nodded with fake solemnity. "Your solidarity is appreciated."

She tensed involuntarily when Yasha touched the rag to her collarbone and relaxed as quickly as she could.

Yasha kept still and said, "I want to do this for you, but you have to tell me if I need to stop. Okay?"

She blinked. "Oh. Right, yeah. That matters again." The rag didn't move, but the fingers bracing her shoulder tightened. "Sorry," Beau said quickly. "I just heard what I said and it sounded dark as shit. I'm really okay. You know, considering." She managed a smile. "But if you were planning on making a move, now might be a bad time."

It took another moment before she felt Yasha's fingers twitch to life. "Of course."

And gods, Beau hated the sorrow she heard Yasha trying to hide for her. "Would you feel better if I told you I was kind of horny right now?"

She heard the sharp exhale of an involuntary laugh. "Only kind of?"

Beau shrugged amicably and winced. Worth it. "Give it time." There was more she could add, but she kept quiet and left things up to Yasha. The inability to see her face made Beau feel bolder, but it also meant she had less warning that she might be about to blow it.

Yasha worked the rag gently over Beau's shoulders and chest, and only when she'd finished with Beau's breasts did she speak up again. "I'm glad."

A lingering pain in Beau's rib twinged hard at Yasha's touch, and Beau hissed softly. "Glad I'm horny?"

Yasha's touch lightened there, and the pain faded by degrees. "Kind of? I'm glad that you're you."

Beau sat and thought about that while Yasha worked gently and clinically down the front of her abs and stomach to her hipbones. There was a lot she wanted to say, some of it probably even healthy, but all that came out was, "I'm glad I'm me too. I think maybe I wasn't, for a while."

Yasha moved to her arm, lifting it gently from the water to hold it with one hand and wash it with the other. "I'm sorry that happened to you."

Shame prickled at her cheeks again, hot and fierce. "It's probably not over." 

"Of course not." Beau couldn't look at her in surprise, so she tilted her head. "You haven't even been awake a full day yet," Yasha said quietly. "There's magic still…messing with you, in your head. All of Obann's control left me at once, and it still took me weeks to separate my thoughts from his."

Ah, shit. She hadn't meant to sound like she was comparing with Obann, didn't want Yasha to feel like she had to put up her darkest feelings to make Beau feel better. "That's different," she said. "That was years. Mine was what, a month?"

She could feel Yasha peering at her in concern. "Are you…embarrassed, Beau? About being hurt?"

That was exactly the thorn in Beau's mind, but she couldn't confirm it - not when Yasha sounded that sad at the mere thought of it being true. "It's just scary," she admitted, which was also true, and a testament to her mental state that she could say it without lapsing. "I'm fine and then I'm not, and it's bullshit. They were fucking amateurs and they got to me. I hate it." She closed her eyes as Yasha brought the rag up over her shoulder and along her throat to clean her face gently. Her voice came out hoarse. "This part's okay though."

Beau felt Yasha's fingertips slowly stroke her brow. "Thank you for letting me help you."

Yasha didn't linger on Beau's legs, whether for the sake of Beau's heart rate or her muscles as she stood holding on to Yasha's shoulders for support. When her hair had been carefully rinsed a second time, Yasha tucked it over the front of Beau's shoulder and murmured "Done." She touched Beau's cheek. "You've been quiet. Are you okay?"

Beau hadn't noticed she'd stopped talking, nor that she'd zoned out. At Yasha's voice, she checked herself cautiously and worked to stay calm as she found the fingers of dread leaking into her. Shit.

Beau did a quick scan of her body and her surroundings and found the cause. It was the water - it had chilled significantly by this point, and Beau's relaxed muscles were starting to tense again. The room that had seemed warm and stable in contrast to the cold dungeon was now clammy on her shoulders, and it was too close to her memories.

Her words had to push their way through her closing throat. "I think I need to get out of here."

Yasha didn't spare a moment for warning before picking her up, and Beau was grateful. Or as grateful as she could be as her breathing started to hitch and she began to shake in Yasha's arms.

"What do you need?" Yasha asked, low and urgent.

Beau knew the intensity was from kindness, but the concept was having trouble sticking to her mind again. "Warm," she managed, and only just bit back a reflexive plea not to hurt her. This was real Yasha. She had to pull it together.

She heard water slosh and wet footsteps on stone, then Yasha paused and some kind of fabric landed on Beau's chest before they crossed to the silent carpet. Beau's sight transitioned from dim dark to bright orange, and she pieced things together just as Yasha threw open a door and carried her outside onto the patio.

Sunlight kissed her skin immediately, all of the water left on her slowly warming as Yasha sat down with Beau in her lap and started to rub her vigorously with the towel she had thought to grab on the way.

"Are you with me?" Yasha's gentle voice seemed to bypass her ears, and Beau straightened a little and blinked as the Celestial pierced through the fear. It didn't obliterate it, but that plus the hot rub of the towel on her arms and the feeling of the light gave her the handhold she needed to climb out.

"I'm here," she said. "Ow."

Yasha exhaled and didn't stop, just slowed down and switched to patting the water off of her instead. She bundled Beau in the towel once she was as dry as she was going to be and held her sitting against her chest, just breathing.

"Better?" Yasha asked.

Beau nodded, enchanted by the way she could hear a flavor of her name in a sentence that didn't directly say it. It was like the question couldn't exist without the context of it, and she enjoyed the way the textures of question and name fed into each other and transformed.

"Yeah," she said. "I really am." She leaned her head on Yasha's shoulder behind her. "I like hearing your voice in Celestial. The way you say my name, it's…comforting." She huffed softly. "And that's pretty impressive right now."

Yasha whispered it on the air, a miracle of emotion somehow transcribed into sound that became a kind of mental image of peace and of security. Beau didn't know which of them the feelings described or belonged to, and she found she didn't mind.

A tingling feeling was rising up in her, something pleasant and light like the soft breeze was whispering through her thoughts and blowing out some of the deepest corners of fear. As she stared out at the orange, she realized that at some point it had resolved into something lighter. There were shadows to it, and when she moved her head they flared and faded but stayed roughly in the same spots.

"Beau?"

She called out in common, and Beau turned to look up at her. She found not so much of a shape as the same sort of impression of dimness, fading in and out as she tried to focus on it. "I think some more of my sight came back."

Yasha's breath caught. "Can you see me?"

Beau squinted hard, trying to find the edges of the aberration in light, but it was no use and she gave up after a moment. "It's all still kind of…it feels like when someone opens a window to wake you up and at first everything is just light and you can't see yet. Doesn't hurt like that, just. Best way I can explain."

Yasha nodded and hugged her softly. "It's something," she said. "Maybe the dreams will leave you alone soon."

Beau shivered and closed her eyes. Some of the warmth seemed to fade, and she burrowed close. "Hopefully. I don't want to keep freaking you out."

"I'm not the focus," Yasha said quietly. "I want you better for you, not me."

But that wasn't how this worked. Beau pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "It's easier to make it about you."

"What do you mean?"

Gods, why was this so hard? "I mean I don't know what to do with what you're saying," she said. Yasha just waited, and Beau took a deep breath. Maybe she could illustrate a little. "They tried to use my parents once or twice," she said. "Early on. Had them take care of me, try to make me feel calm. They gave up on that pretty quickly." She could hear her voice shaking. "I always fought back the moment they started taking any interest in me."

"Beau…"

"I'm not telling you for pity," Beau insisted. "Just. I had an easier time dealing with fuckin'…violence over kindness before they ever got to me. That's not new."

Yasha was quiet for a long time, but the breeze felt somehow as though it were lifting Beau's spirits and no fear came to call. She just waited.

"I'm sorry," Yasha said finally.

Gods damn it. "You didn't know, I was trying -"

"Not for that." Her voice was low, gentle but firm. "I'm sorry I didn't try harder to teach you kindness before they took you." Her fingers threaded lightly through Beau's hair, separating the damp strands. "I wanted to do all of this, but I was just so…caught up in pain. I missed so many chances, and now when I want to help you the most it feels unreal."

Beau's throat felt tight. "This is real," she croaked, reaching to grip Yasha's arm. "I believe it's you. I trust you as much as I know how, whatever that's worth."

Yasha's voice came out a strangled whisper. "It's worth everything, Beau. It always has been, even when I didn't know how to accept it."

"I know," said Beau. "It's the same thing for me. So just." She swallowed. "Don't stop, okay? Even if I pull away, I." She wasn't strong enough to say it yet. "Just don't stop."

She felt Yasha's cheek slide down just far enough for her to press the lightest of kisses to her temple, and Beau's skin erupted into goosebumps all the way to the tops of her thighs. She whispered in Beau's ear. "Are you doing the listening thing?"

Beau nodded. Pulling her ki back through her body had reminded it how to keep it expanded as easy as breathing. Easier, even, such as things were.

Yasha's voice now, in Celestial: "I need to tell you something."

This was more direct than her name had been, and that was alright. It was also a rough translation - the words echoed with the sort of gravitas that came with a lot of imperatives and a sprinkling of "thous." Beau felt suddenly nervous, aware more keenly than usual of Yasha's angelic nature. "I appreciate it, but. You can talk in common if you want."

Yasha's fingers tightened on her hips so minutely that she might have imagined it, and after a moment another indirect jumble of impressions comprised of something on the line between sound and image poured into Beau. Like her name, Beau processed nothing in direct words so much as _intent_. The smell of cool green shade in summer, the heart-in-throat feeling of watching the way soft firelight transformed the sleeping face of someone beloved, the wish so hard it hurt from looking at the moon for too long, missing someone from far away.

It was a promise, an affirmation, and an open door rolled into a sweet echo that rang somewhere inside of her mind and made its home there.

"Oh." Beau's voice cracked in the silence. "That would be hard to say in common, huh."

"There's no direct translation that comes close," Yasha agreed in her regular voice. "It's…I don't even know if what I said and what you heard are exactly the same. But I hope it's enough for now."

Beau's body was still ringing, her chest tight. "Do you mean it?"

The soft, nervous laugh behind her held some of that same Celestial concept inside of it. "It's not a language that allows for lies. Possibly it's why I'm so bad at them."

That made perfect, terrifying sense.

They sat quietly after that, basking in the sun, and gradually that diffuse sense of well-being resolved into something that felt more solid. Beau gloried in the way it felt to be unable to perceive any kind of enclosure, hadn't realized how much it affected her to be outside.

She also realized, very suddenly, that they were all but naked on a patio. "Um." Yasha's chin was resting again on her head and Beau felt her snap back in a way that might have suggested she was dozing. "Are there…other patios, by chance?"

Yasha's head lifted and turned. "A couple, but all below us."

"So no chance someone's getting an eyeful of your awesome body."

A pause. "I think that would just be you."

Beau snorted. "Feel free to describe it to me." She'd meant her flat tone to be funny and was gratified by Yasha's huff as her arms tightened.

"You ready to go in? I think Caduceus might be back soon."

Beau's body felt like a plant yearning for the sun, but she could feel exhaustion pawing at her and knew it was best to get settled back on the bed. "Yeah, okay. But can you leave the door open?"

"Absolutely."

* * *

Caduceus knocked so soon after Beau was dressed in borrowed Chateau pajamas that she deeply suspected he'd been listening for the right moment. Yasha touched her cheek and slipped away to open the door, and seconds later Beau felt the impact of the smell of food like a physical presence. Salt and meat and bread - Beau had trouble recalling the last time she'd been so happy to eat.

"I made you steak and some vegetables," Caduceus said warmly as the plate settled on her lap. "The bread was just to pass the time while the meat cooked. And here." Something depressed next to Beau and leaned on her leg. "I took the liberty of filling your waterskin too."

"Thanks, Duces." Beau stayed still for a moment. "Wait, is someone going to have to feed me? Not gonna lie, not something I'm into."

Caduceus pressed a fork into Beau's hand. "I thought that might bother you, so I've already cut the meat. Try not to be embarrassed," he said as Beau's face warmed. "You're among friends."

He'd been right to guess Beau would prefer this over being fed directly, but it still took her a moment to overcome the shame and take her first bite.

It was worth the blow to her pride and then some. She'd had no clue how hungry she was, and she was probably most of the way through before she slowed down enough to hear the sounds of Yasha eating nearby too. That made her feel better.

She was gnawing contentedly on the small loaf of sweet bread when Caduceus finally inhaled and spoke to them both.

"Caleb wanted me to let you know he's found something. In the book we got from the caves." Beau's ears perked immediately in suspicion. Caduceus might be a bad liar, but he was infuriatingly good at keeping his voice flat.

"What was it?" Beau silently thanked Yasha for asking so she didn't have to stop eating.

Caduceus hesitated, and then spoke in Giant. "Beau. Are you feeling good?"

Now Beau did swallow. "I'm fine," she said. "Don't leave out Yasha."

The end of the bed depressed as Caduceus sat. Beau wondered idly what he'd been doing, felt a little jolt at how easily she could picture him pacing. "Alright," he said in Common. "Is it alright if I bring in Fjord?"

She hadn't expected that, nor the wave of shame that crested in her immediately at the thought of her captain seeing her this way. Still, there was information to be had, and she wanted it.

Beau probed gently at the anxiety, tested its strength and found it far enough away to finally nod haltingly. "Yeah, uh. I think that's fine. I don't have like, meat juice all over me, do I?"

She heard his voice from the doorway, firm and pleasant. "You look fine, Beau. Really." She heard him move closer, then the drag of a chair and rustling as he sat. "It's good to see you, first mate."

She smiled a thin, strained thing. "Fuck you too, man. Just rub it in."

Fjord laughed. "Not what I meant and you know it." Beau decided right then she would never tell him how much good it did her to hear both the laugh and the gentle tease. The Fjord of her nightmares was exacting and cruel, putting her through impossible tasks and punishing her viciously when she failed. It disturbed her to think what memories they'd found to construct that version of him and make it believable.

"But really," he added. "If it stops being fine, just let me know. I'll understand." At Beau's nod, he sighed. Beau could feel anticipation building, and she wasn't certain she liked the flavor of it. "So here's the deal," Fjord said. "Caleb told me a bunch of weird shit that I'm supposed to tell you. A lot of it's bad, but it boils down pretty easy and he thinks he can help."

Beau felt a pang of apprehension and pride lance through her. Never stating a problem without offering a solution. That was Caleb. "Go for it."

"Right." She could almost hear him nod, wasn't sure if she felt better or worse that he clearly had to rally himself. "How much do you know about the assholes that took you?" He began. "Who they were working for, what they wanted, all that. I don't want to go over stuff I don't have to."

So far so fine. "They talked about a god at first," Beau said. "Were real excited about bringing back some pre-calamity motherfucker. Those guys were fucking useless though, so I'm not too concerned."

"They were extremely easy to kill," Yasha remarked.

"Yeah, I thought that was weird too," said Fjord. "Only one of em seemed to have any sort of muscle to him, and all the magic users sucked."

Beau winced. "I do remember the muscle guy. Not very bright. Easy to goad." She turned her head and mumbled. "Embarrassing that they got me at all."

"There's nothing to be embarrassed for," Caduceus said, predictably.

"They fought fuckin' dirty with that," Fjord agreed. "I'll tell you more about that later. Let me get this over with. The short version of what Caleb told me is that these idiots were fucking around with a ritual and they made you part of it."

Beau frowned. "But that's like…rituals take minutes, not a month. They were stupid but not that stupid."

"Well," said Fjord. "That's where it starts getting complicated. This god - I'm not saying his name til we have this sorted, and you'll see why - he can be kind of…self-raising, to a degree. He has to…forge a link with someone." He hesitated.

Beau felt dread pooling in her again, the food turning to ash in her belly. "Go on," she managed. "How?"

She could hear Fjord scrubbing a hand through his hair. "His domain was the underground. Captivity. They uh. Needed to find someone with a strong sense of freedom. Strong-willed."

It made awful and immediate sense, and Beau's voice sounded like it came from somewhere else. "And break it," she murmured.

Beau didn't hear Yasha come closer before the sheets depressed near her knee, and she jumped a little. There was a wild impulse to refuse Yasha's hand, but Beau gritted her teeth and pushed it aside. She liked Yasha touching her. Yasha liked making her feel secure. She would take the damn hand.

Yasha squeezed it gently and asked what Beau didn't want to. "Why?"

Fjord seemed to be pushing himself now, and Beau did her best to make her face neutral so as to not dissuade him. She hadn't thought there had been a purpose to any of this, not after they broke into the big secrets and ignored them completely. If it turned out there was a reason, maybe some things could fall into place.

"It gets fuzzy here for me, but Caleb said that would be okay," Fjord said. "Basically the higher the fall, the greater the link. And if it got strong enough…I don't know. Bad stuff." She wasn't looking his direction but felt like he was looking at her directly. "It didn't work," he said. "There are many, many frustrated journal pages dedicated to cursing you and wondering why you wouldn't give in."

Beau grunted hollowly. "That's not how I remember it."

"You didn't," Yasha said firmly. "You weren't going to let them. You - you tried to die instead."

She groped for her waterskin and took a drink without replying.

"But that stuff is just context," Fjord said decisively. "You've probably already guessed what I'm about to say."

Beau nodded, even as she heard Yasha's soft. "I haven't" and Caduceus' affirming noise.

"It's not an all or nothing link," Beau ventured. "It's still there, just weaker."

"Yes." She heard Yasha's sharp inhale, felt her hand tighten as Fjord continued. "But knowing how it works means we can reverse it."

"Back up," said Beau. "I don't get how it works. What does the link do to me?"

"He's in your mind," Fjord said quietly.

The words seemed to hit Beau's ears and echo. The warm breeze coming through the open door was washing over her, but she just felt cold.

"He can't control you or anything, but the whole point was to make you feel as trapped and as helpless to escape as possible. Being underground and…chained was part of that."

"That's horrible," Yasha breathed.

Any second now, Beau expected the dread to pull her under. She was certainly anxious, maybe even a little panicky, but the specific feeling she was losing her grip stayed at bay. Possibly that was the power of naming things. She rarely found a problem that wasn't solved by naming.

She so hoped this was what solving looked like.

"That's why the illusions," she guessed. "And breaking into my memories. To make my dreams more believable so they would hurt more." She looked in Fjord's general direction. "Wait, are you saying that I'm only blind because I think I should be?"

"I don't get the sense it's that simple," Fjord said. "But the link definitely uses your mind to make itself stronger. He set you up to take that helpless feeling wherever you go. Even in your dreams, when you can't fight it."

She felt winded, like now that he had pointed it out there was an itch in her thoughts. It wasn't real, but the fact of something partially perched in her head, singling her out for the very will that defined her and chewing it up from the inside out, made her feel sick.

"Were there ever even any torturers at all?"

Fjord's voice was as gentle as she'd ever heard it. "Not after a while. They really did suck. All they had to do was get you worn down enough for the link to establish." He inhaled. "According to the book, they mostly stopped after the blindness took hold."

"Because it didn't," Beau said softly. "I just thought it did. Fuck." Tears burned at her sightless eyes. Away from the direct sunlight, the bright white had faded to a kind of fuzzy gray. It killed her to know it shouldn't be real and still feel its effects. She was stronger than this. She had to be.

Yasha lifted their joined ands to wipe gently at her eye, and Beau hated herself for leaning away. She squeezed her hand instead, hoped Yasha understood. Which was rich, because Beau wasn't even certain she understood. "Caleb," she said firmly. "He has an idea for how to sever it, doesn't he. Something I'll hate."

"He said it's risky," Fjord agreed. "It could go -"

Beau shook her head once, violently. "Get it out." Fjord stopped. "Whatever calculated bullshit Caleb's thinking of trying, just do it." Now the dread was coming, a presence strong enough to overwhelm - and so very hungry. How had she ever missed that malevolent hunger?

It wasn't real. It wasn't real.

"Beau." Yasha sounded flat, faraway. "Are you with me?" Beau heard it in Celestial, but it didn't matter. Now she knew - there was no difference in reality and illusion. Not with this…this feeding link. The more she dreaded it being true, the truer it would be.

"No," she said, but it wasn't her in any way that mattered. "Just do it. I can feel it. Do it now." She gripped Yasha's hand as tightly as she could and felt her stomach drop when she was unable to tell if she'd actually moved at all.

The room began to fade into view, and some small part of her was left hanging by a thread to remind herself that wasn't possible. Fjord hadn't touched her. Nothing had changed. Trust nothing.

Beau closed her eyes. She could still see the room.

A whimper escaped, though whether in reality or dream she didn't know. "Caleb," she choked, and took the deepest breath she could. "CALEB!"

He appeared in her vision, and Beau knew even as she scrambled away on leaden limbs that she wasn't moving in reality. He had that smile, flames appearing green and sickly in his hand. It didn't matter that they were the wrong color, that the eyes of the other three watching her were solid black. Those flames would burn all the same.

"Breathe," Caleb said. His voice was urgent and kind, at odds with the predatory smirk before her. Beau blinked furiously, trying to dislodge the vision. "Don't fight it, Beauregard."

She realized Caleb's mouth wasn't moving. His hand reached slowly for her face.

There was a mighty cracking sound beyond the false Chateau room, and all of the dream figures turned as one to stare at the approximation of a violently shuddering door. Something was howling on the other side, something larger than life and as old as the stars. The whole wall vanished like it was never there, and there was nothing behind it. Not darkness, not light, sheer nothing.

The howling cut off into a horrible squeal.

The four illusions hissed, a low and buzzing sound that seemed to fill Beau with an old, familiar terror -

And then the room was empty and silent, like nobody had ever been there. Fear rooted inside of Beau with all the gentleness of a hurled knife. She was completely alone. Possibly she always had been.

"Yasha?" Her voice hit the air and died on nothing. There was nobody there. A sob fell out of Beau. Yasha hadn't been real. Nothing she saw had been real. They would have killed her.

But they had been something. This was so much nothing.

"Anyone," Beau whispered. Then she vanished too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caleb, what'd you do man.


	6. Choice and Intention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caleb acted in Beau's best interest. But there were no good choices, and the ends don't always justify the means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POV swap, for obvious reasons.

In one single, terrible moment, Caleb saw everything: a leech as wide as the sky, writhing and clicking with wet sliding undulations of terrible scales oozing rot. Strings, so many strings, coming down from the millions of arms that protruded from it to wave like silent screams. Most of the strings led to closed doors, or simply dangled with nothing at their ends. But there were four, he could see, that led to one that was open - to Beauregard.

What he saw looked almost childish to him, Caleb there with a clear head and no handhold for torment, no part of him worn down to accept the scene playing out in front of him as truth. In that flash, he saw himself and the other three that had been in the room with him, but they were sagging wooden dummies barely held together. Rudimentary smiling faces of crayon. The room was a slapdash spray of color blocks suggesting space, light with no caster.

And Beauregard, seeing whatever this thing wanted her to.

The spell Caleb had cast was done in kindness, but it was not a kind spell. It was meant to wound, to tear down defenses, to incapacitate. It did not matter what he saw - if he did not move, he would lose her to it because she believed herself to be lost. Sickening, that such a brilliant mind be turned against itself.

He was not part of the dream, but he commanded the rules of the space and the leech was such a shadow of itself here. Beauregard had denied this being for truly so much longer than it had expected, and where it once might have enjoyed the game it was clear now that desperation had weakened it to this parody of a nightmare.

Caleb slashed his hand and the strings cut like spiderwebs. The child's diorama that trapped his sister began to crumble, and the leech coiled and sprang with whip-flash speed and a horrible scream that seemed to span eons. Worlds came together and wasted away in the span of that scream, and time sped up again as it hurtled towards the spot where Beau had been.

But she was no longer there. Nothing was. The monstrosity screamed a whole sky with teeth for stars and plunged towards the only target left. Its prey had vanished, and soon it would waste back to nothing.

The target held his arms open and smiled.

The absurdity didn't escape him, as he was annihilated, that what would have killed Beauregard Lionett was not strong enough to kill Caleb Widogast. But it would, as she would say, hurt like a bitch.

* * *

In another blink, maybe the same one, Caleb was back inside the real room and flat on his back. His head felt split open, warmth running from his nose over his lips to stain his beard. His ears rang, high and insistent, and as he adjusted to its tone he began to make out voices.

"- said it would turn her thoughts off. I don't know what that means." Fjord's voice, low and urgent.

"Caleb." A shadow fell over him and resolved with the voice into a blurry Caduceus, leaning down with hand outstretched.

Caleb forced himself to lift his arm and bat him away, working to sit up. "No healing. Save it in case I was wrong."

Yasha whirled on him, careful not to jostle Beau's limp body in her arms. "What did you do?"

Shame turned Caleb's blood to ice at the accusation in Yasha's voice. He had never heard that tone from her, not once, but he'd be lying if he said he had not fully expected it. He bared his teeth in nothing close to a smile and wiped his nose. "I severed the link. Is she hurt?" He lifted a hand to pull himself up next to the bed and Yasha _snarled_ at him, a vision of wrath no less terrifying for the way she had begun to glow. Once, she had darkened. This was more terrifying.

"Don't touch her."

That was fair, but he had to know if he had managed to divert the god-shadow completely. He would not forgive himself if he had failed, if Beauregard had been wounded the same way as he.

Fjord's hands on his shoulders were not painful or cruel, but they sat him back on the ground and did not let up. "Just stay down here for a minute. Please."

Caduceus was seeing to Yasha, a calming hand on her shoulder and another on an unresponsive Beauregard's chest. "It's okay," said Caduceus. "She's breathing. I think she's sleeping - unconscious, maybe, but not harmed."

Tension in the room seemed to wind down; Caleb hadn't realized how bright Yasha had slowly become until it began to fade and the afternoon light of the room was left clinging to the walls like gasping shadows in its wake.

Fjord's hands left his shoulders, and a moment later he heard footsteps running up the stairs of the balcony. Frumpkin burst into the room ahead of Jester and Veth, who stopped at the door and stared at Beau in Yasha's arms.

Jester's voice was faint. "Oh, no."

"She is alive," he assured tiredly. "She survived. The worst of this is past for her."

Nobody looked relieved.

Fjord's arms were crossed as he stared down at Caleb. Most people stiffened in anger. Fjord always seemed to him to loosen, like a big cat ready to pounce. "Absolutely none of you what explained to me involved whatever the fuck that was. What _did_ you do?"

"I told you one of the options could kill her."

"And that's the one you used. She didn't know the risk, Caleb. Why did you pick that one?" He gestured sharply at him. "You've got black veins up the side of your face. You're telling me that could have been her?"

Caleb wearily pulled forth his rod and set it on the ground. "Please. Bring her inside the tower where we can guarantee her safety, and I will tell you everything."

Jester's lips trembled slightly - this was the first time she had seen Beau since the night she died, and Caleb felt wretched that she looked the same now. "Why do we need to guarantee her safety? You said the worst is over."

He sighed and nodded, but couldn't look at her. "It is. Whatever happens now, she is safe. Tell me, how bad is my face?"

Veth reached out and touched him gently. "It's awful. Like spiderwebs. Caleb, what happened?"

He stayed staring at the ground, a slow and grim satisfaction turning over once inside of him. "I will tell you. Please, come inside." The door sprang up from the ground, light spilling over the red plush carpet of the ground floor. He took Veth by the hand and stepped through, knowing the others would follow and hating himself for hoping they wouldn't.

Jester was first behind them, trotting to catch up and trying to get him to look at her. "Caleb, what's the matter? You can talk to us."

He did his best to smile at her, managed to get his gaze to her mouth. "That is what I'm doing. I just want Beauregard safe first. She will be…disoriented, when she wakes. I want her to have room to roam if she would like." He wasn't sure if it would have made him feel any better, back then. But if he was consigning her to this temporary prison, he wanted it to look nothing like his own.

He could see Jester searching his face, but she just nodded uncertainly and said "okay. Can I…heal your face? You look scary."

He sighed. "You may. Not for me, for Beauregard, in case her sight comes back quickly."

Jester smiled sadly and touched his cheek. "You're a little weird sometimes." The tease fell flat, but he did his best to smile back with sincerity. The pain in his head eased slightly. He tried not to wish for it back. "There. Now they look more red and purple instead of black."

"You might regret your kindness soon," he said. "But thank you." When he saw that the others were all behind him, he simply pointed up and began to float. "Just a little further."

Nobody else spoke for the minute it took him to lead them to a new door and push it open, but Jester gasped in delight at the sight of it.

"Caleb! This is a beautiful room!"

It was huge, taking up a whole floor between their rooms and the ground area. Technically, he had moved the ninth floor down - it was easier to reconstruct the infinity room than a whole floor of individual spaces - and removed the second entirely so that the ceiling soared.

The room was dim but not overmuch, a kind of permanent early evening showing where the walls would be - where they were. There was grass beneath their feet, cool and fresh and interspersed with wildflowers of all colors. A whisper of a breeze ebbed and flowed around them.

Soft lights drifted all around, some following each other like chains and others free floating like small stars. They looked like nothing so much as great, sluggish fireflies and they soothed the eye even as they provided light.

In the middle of this twilit meadow stood a large tent made of sheer fabric and lined along the inside with stationary strands of warm amber lights. There was a tray of food in the middle, blankets of all sizes and thickness, and enough cushions to satisfy even Jester.

Jester reached a hand to touch the wall and frowned, then reached again. She kept moving forward, but didn't move in space. She looked to Caleb, tail flicking in confusion.

"Infinity walls," he explained. "You can run as far as you like and never stray."

"Who's running?" Veth asked softly.

Caleb didn't answer, just led the way to the tent.

Everyone arranged themselves silently, Yasha seeming loathe to let go of Beau and opting to keep her in her arms. His heart twisted when she reached for a blanket and draped it gently over her, then she gently touched her cheek and looked up at him.

She said nothing. She didn't have to.

Caleb took a deep breath, blew it out again and touched a finger to Veth's hand when it squeezed his knee. "I have a lot to explain," he said. "I am not confident that I will have made myself clear by the end, nor that you will accept what I say even if I am perfectly articulate." He looked to Beauregard. "The first thing you should know is that what I did could have killed her. I will not let it go unacknowledged that when I touched her, I knew it was possible." He gestured to his face. "Some spells have such a profound effect on the mind that there is a kind of sympathetic link that forms in the few seconds it takes to use it. I hoped to get in the way of any ill effects, and I succeeded."

Silence reigned, and it was Fjord who spoke up. "You told me you had two ideas. Why don't you start with explaining to all of us exactly what they were and what exactly this one did."

"And why you picked it," Veth added, but from her it was commiseration and support, not condemnation.

He nodded. "First, let me make certain: all of you understand what we were facing, yes?"

"Fjord said there was a very old god looking to make its way back in the world through Beau," said Caduceus. "It fed from her somehow, drew strength from her fear."

"Like the hag with the misery," Jester offered.

"It is not dissimilar," Caleb agreed. "But it was not only fear. It fed on captivity and helplessness. Slavery and torture. I did not get the full picture from the book alone - it was Beauregard's own recounting of what they did that led me to understand the scope of it. From her words I could see what they had facilitated and were still causing even while she was here with us."

"The illusions," said Fjord. "Convincing her she was alone and in danger at all times."

"She _was_ in danger," Caleb corrected. "The link allowed for her thoughts to become physical reality. All they had to do was make her believe she was being killed, and she was." He looked down at his hands, rubbed pensively at the dry blood from his nose. "Luckily, she also imagined herself healed. Or perhaps the god did. I am unclear, and I have a mind untouched by this nightmare. I cannot imagine what it was for her."

That wasn't strictly true. He had only a glimpse of the trap in Beauregard's mind, but it was a glimpse with more than sight and there were echoes that he suspected would rise to the surface over days and dreams.

"And the spells?" Fjord's voice matched his hands from earlier: not unkind, but not giving Caleb the benefit of the doubt. He appreciated that.

"You know that I spent a very long time in an asylum," he said. The words came easily enough, but it would not have mattered if they cut his throat like glass - they simply must be said. "I myself cannot…conceive of how long. Not in my memory. I know of it only from the understanding I gained when I was freed."

"I still think ickythong is full of shit about being the one to let you go," Jester grumbled. Her tail flipped disagreeably in the grass beside her.

She was trying to bring down the tension, and he loved her for it but knew it to be useless. "Even so," he continued, "there is a reason that a mind as keen as my own could not parse or make sense of those days, after."

Veth looked up at him anxiously. "It was a terrible time in your life, Caleb. I don't know how long I was a goblin, Yasha's not sure how much she's missing -" Caleb did not dare look at Yasha. If he did, he would be unable to continue. "It's understandable, I mean," Veth finished.

He patted her hand and shook his head. "It was magic. A terrible kind of spell that strips a person of everything that comprises who they are. Time means nothing. You are not there. Memories you retain from the experience will be mostly flashes of emotion, or perhaps touch. But there are not many, and they are without context."

He stopped for a moment, forced his mind back from the old, familiar path it longed to follow down to darkness. It was inevitable that he would go, but now was not the time.

"Caleb?" Jester whispered. "Do you know that spell?"

He inhaled. Exhaled. "I do. And I know that Caduceus here, and even you yourself have the magic that can remove it."

"So there's no danger," Fjord ventured. "Just a really fucked up idea for how to stop her thoughts."

"There was danger." Caleb spoke firmly. "I was very clear that it could have killed her. The spell rendered Beauregard without defense entirely and put her at its mercy."

"But you were able to stop it," Veth said anxiously. "That's why your face is fucked up."

"I was. But I did not know if it was possible before I did it."

Now they understood, and he felt the deadly calm fall over them all. Caleb did his best to keep breathing.

"What was the other spell?" Fjord asked finally. "You mentioned…redecorating."

He laughed once, humorless. "That one would have allowed me to walk through her head and correct her memories by hand. Peel the god's fingers back one by one, firmly establish dream from reality."

"Why didn't you do that one?" Jester asked.

The big question. "Beauregard's mind is hers and hers alone," he said. "She has fought tooth and nail for this to be so. I know it. You know it. It is known that her mind is her most sacred space." Deep breath. "Had I put my hands on any one of her thoughts, even to help, she would doubt her memories were her own for the rest of her life. And I would have seen everything she has ever tried to keep secret." He rubbed a thumb over his hand and spoke the last part quietly. "She would have rather died."

"But the second one _would_ have guaranteed her safety," Fjord confirmed. Caleb nodded. "I see."

There had been no good choices. He had made the one that Beauregard would have wanted, what she'd chosen if she'd had just a little more time for Fjord to explain. He should have anticipated that alerting Beau to the presence of the link would trigger it. He had been a fool, forced himself and Beau into an impossible situation. Caleb was certain of his pick even as his stomach sank at the sight of Yasha as she calmly deposited Beau into a mildly startled Caduceus's lap and rose slowly to her feet. He remained certain when the tent began to glow, and it was only when Yasha took three steps forward to grab him by the throat that he was able to drag his eyes up to her face.

She seemed more angel than human to him in her building rage. Divine judgement come to call. "How could you?" 

She wasn't squeezing him hard enough to choke, but her fingers were warming in a way that was going to start hurting very soon. The thought calmed him. "It is what she would have chosen," he managed. "But I will not defend it."

"I will," said Veth, and he didn't have to see her to know she had her crossbow out. He closed his eyes and willed it away, heard her yelp a second later. "Fuck! Stop it!" She was yelling at him, not Yasha.

"Weapons stay in the training rooms," he said grimly.

Yasha ignored all of it. "You put her in the hell you lived in for eleven years, knowing exactly what it was like and what could happen when you did it." Her hand tightened and he gasped involuntarily, just the once. "How could you gamble on whether or not it was even possible to stop it? Answer me, Caleb."

"To shut her off was to shut that thing off," he managed. "To alter her memories was to do as they had done and tell her what is real."

"You _did_ do what they did," Yasha growled. "You cut her off from all of us. You did it _more_."

He grimaced. "But she does not know that. There is only us to bear it, and her thoughts stay her own when it is over."

"I have been bearing it, Caleb." The truth of her words hit him like a punch to the gut. "I lost her. Over and over. Every time, she found her way back. Now she can't, and that was _you_. You took her."

"Yasha." This was Caduceus.

"I'm not interested in arguing." Her eyes were glowing. Caleb believed her.

"It's Beau."

Yasha turned, and Caleb could just see around her light. Caduceus was squinting with his hand over his eyes, and Beau was sitting up and staring in their direction. Her eyes roved over the light, fear scrawled across her features.

Yasha's face softened immediately, and she somehow looked more terrible for it. The Yasha looking at Beau like that would burn a world with righteous fury to keep her safe.

The world, or a wizard.

"Beau, it's okay," Yasha whispered. Her voice cracked. "It's me."

Beau gave no indication she'd heard, because she hadn't. She just kept watching the light and looking afraid.

"She is pure instinct," Caleb said. "I think you have to stop glowing."

She turned back to him, looking lost. "But I'm still angry."

He lifted a hand and rested it on her wrist. Not to stop her or to brace himself, just to hold. "I'm sorry," he said sincerely. "You can't be angry right now."

Yasha's expression was seconds from shattering, whether into sorrow or fury he could not tell. "I have to be. If I'm not angry, it feels like…like I'm _okay_ with...any of this."

Caleb didn't have anything to counter with. It was difficult when he understood her so completely. For all that her anger blazed in bursts, Caleb's was a slow and insistent burn that never faded and reminded him every second of its presence - the inwards to her outwards, and the same end result.

"If she's running on instinct, she can't understand that," Fjord broke in gently. "You have to put it down. For her."

Yasha swallowed, still staring Caleb down. "Tell me I'm right to be angry."

She wasn't talking to him, but he could not refuse to answer. "You are."

Caduceus piped up, kind as ever and seemingly unflappable in the face of it all. "Anger isn't right or wrong, Yasha. It just is." His free hand was wrapped loosely around Beau's waist as she stared, frozen. She grunted softly, pushed against his arm.

"But actions are right or wrong," said Fjord. "You don't hurt people."

Yasha's grip slackened, but her gaze pinned Caleb in place as surely as her hand. "No," she agreed softly. "I protect and I avenge." The glow was starting to fade, and Caleb could make out tears glimmering in her eyes. "I couldn't protect her. From old gods or pain…or from you." She let him go completely, rested her hand over his collarbone. "You took her mind and left her defenseless. That's what _they_ did, Caleb. That's why they are dead, and it doesn't feel like enough."

His heart broke to see her like this. "I know. I have made jailors of us all." He moved his hand to grasp hers. "It does not matter what she would have chosen, because she was not the one who did. I understand."

She exhaled sharply, a gallows laugh. "You know she will not be as angry with you as you deserve." 

Caleb smiled in sad agreement. "She is never angry enough at the people who hurt her."

Yasha's arm dropped to her side. She was no longer glowing at all. "No. She isn't. But that is also her choice. Not mine." A tear streaked down her cheek to disappear under her shirt. She didn't wipe it away. "You did what she would do," she said to him. "That doesn't make it right, but you did _something_. What do _I_ do?" 

"Hold onto it," he said. "She is lucky she has you to be angry for her. I will understand if you want to revisit this with me. Both of you."

She sat down slowly, turned away from Beauregard and Caduceus. "No," she said, and the finality in that word could have stopped the birth of a star. "I don't hold onto my anger anymore. I used to, and that…" She searched for words, coming closer to the Yasha he recognized. "I never want to be that again. When I let it go, it's gone, and that is good." She took a deep and shuddering breath, looking up at the lights. "But she was taken while I slept. She was killed while I watched over her. I couldn't _stop_ it, and there is nobody else...to answer for any of it. So much happened to her after we brought her home, and there's no one else to fight."

"Yasha…" Jester's voice trembled, but Yasha gave no response. She stayed still when Jester leaned in wrap her arms around her.

"I failed her." 

Caleb could feel the realization set in among them all, the weight of understanding the burden Yasha had been carrying since the moment they had woken up to find Beau missing. Yasha was not a good liar. She behaved according to how she felt. Nothing had been kept from them that she had not kept from herself, and it was only now that Beauregard was safe that the full weight of her terror and helplessness was descending on her.

There was faith in that, he supposed, the acceptance that things were moving forward.

Jester reached to grip Yasha's jaw, gentle but unyielding when Yasha tried to pull away. "You didn't fail her, Yasha. You saved her."

Yasha shook her head slightly. "You and Caduceus and Caleb did that. All I could do was watch." Her voice fell to a whisper. "And now...has she always been afraid of my anger? Is this what she's hiding, this fear?"

"Huh." Caduceus said softly. Caleb had almost forgotten he was there. "Is that what you got from that?"

Jester let go of her to turn to him, but Yasha only looked marginally in his direction - Beauregard's direction. Her voice was dull. "What are you saying?"

"I just feel like you're maybe assuming too much. There's plenty of reasons to be afraid when you can't think."

Caleb hadn't consciously realized he had also been avoiding looking at Beau, but he did so now. She was sat contentedly in Caduceus's lap, petting the fur on his forearm over and over where it rested over her knee. Her face was blank and too smooth, eyes shifting ceaselessly but staying in the same general area. Still blind. Still stripped of her mind.

"I was very angry and I frightened her," said Yasha. "I don't feel like that is a difficult assumption."

Caduceus sat up a little straighter. "Uh huh. Yeah, the glowing was definitely part of it." He looked from Beau to Yasha. "Could you do it again?"

Her cheeks turned pink under the soft, warm lights. "No. That only happens when I'm angry."

"What about your wings?" Caleb glanced at Veth, surprised. She glared at him. "What? I can yell at Yasha and get pulverized later. Beau needs our help."

Yasha buried her face in her hands. "I'm not pulverizing anybody."

"We know." Fjord wasn't quite smiling. "But as for the wings, she might knock Jester and Caleb out of the tent."

"We could step outside," Jester offered.

Caleb realized the atmosphere had changed suddenly. Nothing about their situation was different, but everyone was breathing more easily.

Caduceus made a thoughtful noise. "Maybe. But I was thinking maybe Yasha should try to call her."

Caleb spoke up, guilt tearing at his guts. "It won't work." He studiously avoided anyone's gaze, hated reminding them all how much he knew about the spell he had used on Beauregard. "I'm sorry," he added to Yasha. "She can't understand speech. Mood, perhaps. Emotion. Intent. But nothing so clear cut as ideas or names."

He wilted in the moment of silence that followed. Yasha had been right, he knew - he had severed Beau more completely from the reach of her loved ones as the god squatting in her dreams.

Yasha took a deep breath, and Caleb quickly shrugged himself free of his thoughts to pay attention, to help if he could.

"Beau," she said. Beau didn't look up.

Yasha took a smaller breath and said it again. This time a chaotic and cool spray of colors and light bumped up against Caleb's thoughts, along with a flash of understanding all his own of what she was hoping to do.

Celestial, he knew, was capable of following its own set of internal laws and structures. That was what made it possible to study. But the secret to speaking it had nothing to do with the shape of words. Words were for neutral statements and commands - the magic of Celestial was derived from intent. Celestial was less of a proper language and more of mechanism by which to deliver pure truth as the speaker understood it - a way to communicate context for thoughts that might take a lifetime of individual experience to otherwise parse. To speak Celestial was to put your soul into your words.

This was why Bren had studied it so furiously, and it was why Caleb had not spoken it since.

Could that work?

Yasha was not speaking to him, and so her intent had passed him over as little more than an understanding of Yasha's _yearning_. There was no better word for it.

Beau, however, reacted instantly. Her head snapped up, hand frozen on Caduceus's arm and eyes wide and fixed. She looked so young, none of the tension in her brows and completely unable to disguise or dampen her emotions.

"Ah." Caduceus smiled broadly. "I think that did the trick. Try it again."

Yasha was already looking away, pained. "She is still afraid. I know I deserve it, but please…" Her voice resolutely refused to tremble. "I already see her afraid of me in my nightmares."

But Caleb understood. He was the only one besides Caduceus and Yasha who had seen that face on their friend, and he knew how to fix it. "Yasha, she isn't. Look." He rested his hand against her bicep. "Please. Not at yourself, look at Beauregard as you know her to be and tell me - do you truly not recognize what you see?"

Yasha lifted her head slowly, dragged her gaze to Beau's face. She was making quiet snuffling sounds now, head turned as though straining to hear. Yasha's face was a mask of soft hurt and resignation. "I see fear."

"Yes," he said. "But not of you." He squeezed her arm, hard. "I have seen that face through Frumpkin's eyes. You have seen it too. It is there when she wakes, in the moment before she knows she is safe."

Veth took up the slack in his words as she always did and brought it home for Yasha. "She's not afraid of you. She's looking for you."

Yasha inhaled sharply, and Caleb could see the struggle behind her eyes.

"That what she's hiding," said Jester. "Not fear of you. Fear of being without you."

"Call her again," said Veth. "Let her know you're here."

Yasha looked from Veth to Jester, then to Caleb, who nodded. She turned to Beau once more and released a long, trembling breath. Intent fluttered in Caleb's mind as she spoke again, a flash of color and light and warmth that translated in the ears to a silvery melody.

Beau made a terrible noise of undisguised need, and only Caduceus's quick grab prevented her from toppling forwards out of his lap.

"Hey, hey, hold on there, I don't think you can move that much just yet."

She squirmed and whined with no heed to her residual injuries or his voice, and then she threw out a desperate arm to clutch at the air. 

Jester turned to Yasha and said, "Go to her."

But Yasha was already moving.

* * *

Yasha crashed to her knees in front of Caduceus and touched her fingers to Beau's as slowly as she was able. If she truly scared her now, Yasha's heart might explode.

Lightning fast and with no such caution, Beau snatched her wrist and started pushing forwards again until Yasha was finally forced to just reach over and lift her from Caduceus's lap and into hers lest her pants keep coming down.

Beau burrowed into her with an unreserved and awkward strength that seemed somehow only slightly tempered by injury and weakness. Her arms felt like steel around Yasha's neck, her feet locked behind her waist, her breath hot on the side of Yasha's neck as her cries tapered off into a long sigh and quiet snuffling.

Yasha said her name with all of the relief and fear and thankfulness she could muster. She didn't know what Beau heard, but she whined and squirmed closer and that was more than enough. Yasha wrapped her arms around Beau's warm back and pressed her cheek against her hair.

"Well that's just nice," said Caduceus.

"You know I think I saw her react that way to a dragon once," mused Fjord. "Natural fear response. Quite common."

She tilted her head to catch his broad, teasing grin and did her best to smile back, but in truth her entire being seemed to be comprised of only the places she could feel Beau against her.

"I'm sorry," she murmured in Common. "I won't stay away anymore." Beau didn't respond, but Yasha hadn't said it for her.

"Soooo, where are we on killing Caleb, roughly?" Veth asked. "Out of curiosity. I mean I'll fucking cut you if you try it, but what are we looking at here?"

Jester giggled. "She's not going to hurt Caleb. Right Yasha?"

She turned her head a little to talk over her shoulder and found herself capable of levity. "No, Beau's going to be fine. He can live."

"Thank you," said Caleb soberly.

Right. He was not. Not yet.

Yasha shifted around so that she could see him, Beau clinging contentedly to her torso. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't have…you're my friend. And you're Beau's friend."

"I know. But you would have been right to."

Veth smacked his arm lightly. "Stop that. No she wouldn't."

"I wouldn't," Yasha agreed.

"See? Now eat a fucking sandwich, you've been staring at a book for three days."

  
Caleb eyed the platter. "Ja. Okay. These will hold me while I have the cats make us something real."

Fjord slid in closer next to Jester and reached for a sandwich too. "So the plan is to…wake her up, I guess? Tomorrow?"

"I'll be able to," Caduceus agreed. He turned to Caleb. "You're certain it will work?"

Caleb hesitated. "On Rumblecusp, when we had the trouble with our memories. The magic used to fix that…it was very familiar to the feeling I had when I woke up that day, in the asylum."

Caduceus nodded. "That's good enough for me."

Yasha's chest tightened. "Is the god…gone? Forever?"

Caleb swallowed his bite. "He is back to starving away from the world. Gone from Beauregard, if not existence." He watched them for a long moment, the dark veins of his face making him look somehow small. "I don't know what recovery will look like," he said. "I imagine a lot of nightmares, time needed to get her strong again. But her mind is her own. It is set on a shelf, and we will return it to her tomorrow intact."

"I can't wait," said Jester. "I've missed her soooo much."

Yasha smiled. "She's missed you too. She wanted me to give her a haircut before she saw you all. Well. Before you saw her."

Jester gasped. "Yasha! Did you use the bath together?"

"It was a nice bath," she said truthfully. "It might be good to try it again under better circumstances."

Jester frowned. "Yeah. Baths should be fun. Also you should kiss her in one."

"Jester." Fjord was looking darker in the light.

"What? It's the best!"

They faded into a not-argument as the others chatted and snacked quietly, and Yasha watched them all for a long few moments before a small sound startled her from just below her ear. It was a snore, she realized - at some point, Beau's death grip had relaxed by degrees into a sort of boneless snuggle.

Yasha looked down at Beau's slack, open expression. She almost looked healthy like this, but for her hair length and some thinning in her face. Recent events notwithstanding, Beauregard had always been as open asleep as she was guarded awake.

The thought made Yasha smile, but she also worried distantly. Would the progress they made reset when Beau awoke? What if the link vanished and took all of her memories, or made them all into dreams? Could they get back to this point, or would Yasha be left with this ache that had been slowly rolling through her in every moment she'd spent with the knowledge that Beau wanted her to stay?

Would she still want Yasha to stay?

Beau snuffled quietly in her sleep and pressed closer with a small sigh that puffed against Yasha's skin. She was surprised to find a lump in her throat at the simple gesture, and suddenly the fact of Beau choosing her when there was nothing in the way of ability to think seemed properly overwhelming. They _would_ make it back here, she decided. This was Beau at her base level, all guards down. If she woke up tomorrow and put them all back up, it would be alright. 

The next time Beau fell asleep on her like this, it would be on purpose. And if that meant she had to wait a while longer...this was more than worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got more coming, eventually. Make of that what you will :3
> 
> (we'll get back to Beau pov)


	7. Respite and Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time to wake Beau up - but first, an unexpected reprieve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to post these as separate chapters, but here have a long one as a treat. I have been busy.

On the morning of the third day, Yasha woke to Beau still sleeping soundly beside her and dawn creeping in through the open doors. She'd slung her arm over Beau's waist in the night, and she couldn't help but take a moment to look over the picture they made like this before the guilt came calling to remind her - these were borrowed moments, not actually theirs. It was even more true for the last two days – they had woken in the room of drifting lights on that first morning to find Beau still sleeping soundly, and none of them had wanted to wake her.

“Let her rest,” Caduceus had said. “Gods know she's gone without it long enough.”

In all reality, Yasha knew, there was no way to guess how Beau would react when she could think again or what she would remember. She closed her eyes and waited for all of the sorrow and guilt and anxiety to finish pooling inside of her before getting to work gently scraping it back in its box. There would be time for that, later. For now, Beau was still asleep and still hers.

At least she couldn’t feel bad about curling up under the blanket with Beau – not much. On the first night, Beau had slept atop her in the tower like a cat. On the second, they had gone back to the Chateau, where Yasha had tried to sleep in the chair next to the bed like before.

She'd woken in the middle of the night to heartbreaking whines and a half-conscious Beau clutching at empty sheets, unable and unwilling to be soothed until her body was once again flush against Yasha's. The sigh she'd given when Yasha's knees pressed gently behind hers had been one of the most beautiful things Yasha had ever heard, and she staunchly refused the little whisper that told her it was perverse to enjoy soothing Beau from a distress she had caused.

At any rate, she'd slept in the bed since.

As she’d done yesterday, Yasha tugged Beau carefully close and rolled them off the side of the bed to pad towards the terrace. There was no reason to assume taking an hour to watch the sun rise did anything particularly special for Beau, but Yasha could not forget how Beau had been purposefully made to feel out of reach of the light and the open air for an equivalent of six weeks or so, according to Caleb. Nor could she forget that for all the scary circumstances that had brought them out here three days ago, this terrace had also been where Beau's sight had last measurably improved.

And in spite of everything, there was a strange comfort in sharing the start of her day like this with Beau. Yasha could only hope that they would find themselves back here on purpose, next time with Beau properly awake - or at least herself - and talking in her gravelly morning voice about everything and nothing at all while they roused by degrees.

More than anything, Yasha just missed her. Having her be here but away from her in everything that made her Beau was such a unique sort of torment.

Beau stirred softly and squirmed a little closer, pulling back a shoulder so that her arm flopped out of Yasha's hold to dangle off to the side. Yasha smiled and waited for her light snoring to resume before gently tugging it back over her waist.

She studied Beau's arm as she held it, then lifted her hand to trace a short, faint scar left over from the night her dreams had stabbed her to death while Yasha slept. It was almost completely faded, the thinnest of white lines against Beau's sun-starved skin, but Yasha felt an invisible, matching wound throb in sympathy over her heart just to see it.

Beau’s arms looked so exposed without their wraps, but it gladdened Yasha to at least have her back in her breastband and undershorts. Even though her hair was still shaggy on the sides, the dark blue against her skin and the rough estimation of her usual topknot braid - it had taken Yasha an hour, how did Beau do it so quickly? - went a very long way to making the sleeping figure in her arms look closer to the vibrant spark of her that was currently locked away.

The shock of what had been done to Beau to protect her mind had taken the better part of a day to fully wear off, and it was another before she was able to look Caleb in the eye again. He'd made it easy for her, finding excuses to be in the same room while he worked and being the one to work with Yasha to get Beau to drink or take a boba.

She really couldn't blame Caleb for the choice he'd made, at the end of the day. Maybe it was less that Beau wouldn't be angry enough at him and more that Yasha had needed hours to assess what would take Beau only seconds.

She didn't know. She so badly wanted to ask. How had she been so content to stay quiet before? Yasha looked down at Beau, searching those steady blue eyes for answers and past caring if they turned out to be her own hopes she saw reflected there.

Her brain caught up to that thought a moment later with a sensation of some kind of internal thunderclap.

"Beau," she breathed. "You're awake." Her heart tugged at the vacancy behind Beau's eyes, but she felt her shoulders relax in a way that suggested they'd been far more tense than Yasha realized.

Beau turned her head slowly out towards the sun and the world spread below them, eyes wandering idly but catching unmistakably on anchor points. She wasn't roving aimlessly in the way Yasha had grown used to - Beau was _seeing_.

Suddenly, Yasha couldn't stand going another second without being at the focus of Beau's gaze - cursed herself for having been too slow to catch the significance the first time. She skipped Common and went straight for Celestial. "Will you look at me?"

In an instant, those eyes were trained on her, set within an expression of undisguised interest and…fascination? None of Beau's facial features moved in a way familiar to Yasha, and her eyes were flat and glassy, but there was a kind of intelligence there even if it wasn't Beau's. _Intent_. Intent seemed to be the name of the game these days. So strange that it should come under these circumstances, on the heels of spending so long avoiding any examination of the very same thing. 

Without warning, Beau sat up and pushed her feet under her, gripping Yasha's shoulders and startling her back to the present as she brought up a knee to try and - what, climb? Yasha remembered the overhang above where they were sitting in a flash, and only the fact of Beau's recovering body enabled Yasha to make a grab for her before she could leap.

"No, you can't go on the roof like this -" it was useless. Beau might as well have had no bones. She squirmed from Yasha's grasp and leapt much more quickly, evading Yasha's swipe to grab her entirely before swinging a leg up and around quick as a squirrel to perch on the tile above and grin triumphantly from her crouch, making satisfied little noises.

Yasha sighed, less concerned about Beau's innate fondness for high places and talent for reaching them and worried more about how much her body would physically let her do. Was Beau aware of her limits, or would she just go through instinctual motions until something failed her?

And what was Yasha supposed to do now?

Beau wasn't looking at her anymore but out towards the water and the trees, a familiar kind of hunger in her gaze that made Yasha's stomach turn over even as she scrambled into action. There was no point asking herself if Beau would make the leap - she'd seen her attempt and succeed from higher places than this. Yasha jumped to grasp the ledge and hauled herself up to snatch at Beau's waist in the split second before she could spring.

The sound Beau made when Yasha yanked her back up against her and refused to let go was unmistakably indignant and plaintive in equal measures, but she only leaned and pawed at the ground far below them and didn't try too hard to struggle. Some part of her must have understood the precarious nature of the thin, steep alcove they were on.

"Okay." Yasha took two deep breaths. "Okay. Fuck." She looked down, but it was a pointless thing. She already knew that the rail around the terrace was too close to the lip of the roof to risk hopping down while holding Beau. Climbing up wouldn't solve anything either. She had to make her plan while she had some control of Beau. Beau herself dangled a bit over Yasha's arm around her waist, apparently content now to just stare below and squeeze at Yasha's forearm with an absentminded hand.

"You are a…like a big nightmare cat," Yasha said in Common, but the truth was that babysitting an active and mischievous Beau was far more in line with her skill sets - and habits, honestly - than sitting helplessly by her bed or waiting for her to wake up.

She checked around them one more time and sighed. "If you want to jump so badly, well...hold on."

Her wings pulled free from nothing, a sense of light and completion that didn't half make sense and which she tried not to overthink. 

Yasha maneuvered a gangly but willing Beau into kind of bridal style carry and struggled to keep her from climbing her shoulder to pet her feathers. "I feel like you're going to maybe hate this," she managed, and then she held tight and jumped.

Beau hated it.

At least until Yasha swooped them upwards, at which point her terrified whimpering - Yasha silently thanked the gods she hadn't screamed - resolved into a wide-eyed fascination as her eyes frantically flicked over every possible sight. Yasha's heart was cracking down the middle even as she smiled. This felt so close to their first flight on Rumblecusp, but inverted somehow. Not wrong, just…incomplete. She wasn't able to truly share this with Beau.

But whatever of her that was here seemed to love every second, and so Yasha was determined to experience it for the both of them. On a whim, she took them out over the water for a loop, and Beau was light enough that it was nothing to let her dangle so that her toes skimmed the water. The delighted noises she gave made Yasha ache with equal affection and sorrow, and she kissed the top of Beau’s head before scooping her close and angling back for the Chateau.

She hadn't heard it over the wind in her ears, but when Yasha alighted on the path leading to the wide double doors of Jester's home, it was to find Beau pressed against her chest and giggling - an unreserved, delighted sound at odds with everything about the last ten days.

A voice called out from the now-open doors as Jester darted towards them, worry melting at the sight of the two of them unharmed. She slowed to a stop a few feet away and watched curiously as a still-giggling Beau pulled herself up over Yasha's shoulder to reach for a wing.

"Blud saw you take off," Jester said. "Is everything okay?"

Yasha winced even though it felt like the wrong kind of reaction for whatever sensation was coming from the feathers Beau was clumsily petting. "Everything is fine, but Caleb knew more than he was letting on about instincts, I think." She gave up trying to pull Beau back down and just held onto her ankle when the wings dissolved and she inevitably fell forwards to hang upside down. "We need that room in the tower." 

Jester nodded and took off again. "I'll tell Caleb!"

When she’d gone, Yasha gripped Beau's foot with both hands and hauled her dangling to the front. "Are you good?"

Beau reached for the ground, grunting softly but seeming content.

"I have an idea." Yasha slung one of Beau's knees over her shoulder and reached back to grope for and do the same with the other. She'd never done this with Beau before, but something told her the restlessness inherent inside of that lean little body would nudge her in the right direction. After a moment of twisting against Yasha's back, she felt Beau pause. She made a quiet grunting noise, and then the muscles in her legs stiffened against Yasha's shoulders and her hands scrabbled to find purchase on Yasha's wrists.

"Good girl." Yasha folded herself forward to help. Beau in top condition could have done the sit-up thirty times without breaking a sweat, but the Beau of right now needed a little help and that was fine too.

There was a moment where it looked like Beau might be too out of it to lock in her position, but finally she was situated on Yasha's shoulders and snuffling quietly as her hands came to tangle in and pet Yasha's hair. Perfect.

"Let's get you fixed up before one of us pulls a muscle," Yasha remarked, and strode inside.

The doorways were barely tall enough to accommodate Yasha and there were a few near misses - she desperately hoped Caleb was right about not remembering - but finally they stepped into the room the two of them had called home for the last ten days to find the tower door open and Caduceus gathering the last of their things.

He smiled warmly at them. "Everyone's already gone up. I'm right behind you."

Beau began to squirm again as they rose up to the new room, sounding more excited than frightened. Yasha had always known Beau to have an affinity for high places, but she gathered now that the experience of weightlessness itself was another facet to what made Beau tick. She didn't know yet what to do with all of the little scraps of information she'd picked up in the short time Beau had been conscious during this ordeal, but she tucked it away regardless. Possibly she would do nothing with them and wait for Beau to tell her what she wanted in her own words. But there was a small and guilty part of Yasha that was pleased to have the windows to the inside of her blown open so wide. It also felt a little indecent though - like spying on someone changing clothes.

She'd worry about that later. For now, there was nothing to do but bring Beau back - to herself, to them all, to Yasha - and go from there.

Beau took off as soon as Yasha knelt to help her down, keeping low and streaking barefoot across the grass with a stamina that confused and delighted Yasha to see in action. Caleb sidled up next to her with a frown that wasn't quite a frown. "I feel Jester undersold exactly what was meant by 'awake.'"

Yasha rubbed her shoulder and rolled it experimentally. "She can see. And she wants to see _everything_."

Understanding dawned on Caleb's face. "If the blindness has faded, many of her wounds have likely disappeared as well. That would explain the agility."

Veth popped up between them. "What's with the run? She doesn't move like that."

Yasha had to agree there was something eerie about the way Beau loped across the grass, swatting at lights and rolling intermittently.

"No," Caleb agreed. "She doesn't. This is both Beauregard at her most and least. Her personality is raw, unrefined by habit and choice."

"She looks like she's playing," said Fjord.

That was fairly evident to Yasha, too. There was no other word for the abandon with which Beau rolled in the grass, making little growls and grasping for floating lights. They watched her bite at one of them and come away confused when the orb simply dissolved.

Caleb tsked. "That one was a cat."

Yasha blinked. "Some of your lights are cats?"

He shrugged. "Easier to have some that will interact and some that just float."

"You thought about this room a lot, didn't you?"

He flashed her a pained smile. "I remember little of my time under the spell's effects, but I like to think it might have been nicer - having someone who perhaps wanted to make a little of it easier."

"That's so sweet," said Jester. "I totally would have made it nicer if I had been there."

Caleb's smile was thin, and then he turned abruptly to Caduceus. "Are you all set?"

They all knew he was even before he nodded, but there was a tension mounting in the atmosphere that none of them particularly wanted to touch yet. "It might be best if everyone stays back until we know how she’s feeling," he said. His eyes found Yasha's, large and kind. "But it also feels important that you come along."

Apprehension coiled in Yasha's chest alongside the tentative excitement. "Because she listens to me?"

Caduceus chuckled and started walking. "Because she'll be looking for you."

That squeeze again, Yasha's heart and her gut clenching at the same time for very different reasons. She fell into step with Caduceus, calling to Beau softly when they were close.

She tipped her head back to look at them upside down and, evidently seeing nothing of a threat in their approach, went back to swatting at a little globe dancing just out of her reach but always dodging back towards her.

Yasha glanced back at Caleb, who pointedly looked off in another direction, and smiled to herself.

They knelt on either side of her, Caduceus reaching into his pouch and taking a moment to just be still and let Beau take in the fact of them so close. "It's alright, Beau," he said. "It's been a strange couple of days without you, but you needed some sleep."

Beau stared at him, face blank but seeming soothed by the sound and tone of Caduceus's voice - and content, for the moment, to stay still. She tracked his hand as he lowered it carefully to her shoulder, and then she reached up to grasp at his forearm and feel the fur.

He smiled. "Yep, still soft. Are you ready?"

Yasha thought for a moment that Beau must have understood somehow, because she turned questioning eyes up to Yasha and made those quiet snuffling sounds. She looked for all the world like someone seeking reassurance, and Yasha reached out to stroke her hair back on pure reflex as she scrambled for something to add. "It won't hurt, I promise."

Beau's fingers wrapped around her arm and pulled Yasha's hand to rest on her opposite shoulder, and then she understood. She wanted a hand from each of them, and was holding them pressed to each shoulder as she made a low and contented noise in her throat.

Yasha was forcibly reminded of Rumblecusp, when she and Fjord had revived and healed her for what they could after a creepy ghost thing had taken Beau down with a look. Half-delirious with the rush of losing and gaining consciousness so quickly, she'd rolled a little under them in the same kind of way.

"Please keep touching me," she'd said, and those words played on a loop in Yasha's mind as Caduceus popped the cork on a tiny vial and tilted it one-handed into his palm.

"Okay," he said, and tipped the dust to sprinkle gently down towards Beau's face. The powdery gem caught in the light, shimmering and flashing to vanish on contact with Beau's skin. "Time to wake up."

* * *

Beau didn't tend to remember dreams, not since her first couple of months at the monastery. As a kid, they'd been bright and colorful and extraordinarily bizarre, wild images that followed her well into the next day to become stories she scribbled on random scraps of paper or inside one of the journals she kept stuffed under her bed.

The dreams had been vivid and bizarre as an adult, too, but they also happened outside of her head sometimes while she was pinned inside her unmoving body. Waking up from those always felt like a snap, an instantaneous wakefulness that left her disoriented for a moment and with the vague sense she was seeing afterimages of things that hadn't really been there to begin with.

This felt like that, only she hadn't woken up before they touched her - she was pinned, but there were real hands on her that only vanished when she sat straight up and flailed with limbs that felt only vaguely like they belonged to her. Where the fuck was she? How did she get here?

She realized she was holding one wrist and rubbing her thumb along a thin ridge of scar tissue, and the simultaneous acceptance of its existence and the feeling that it should be bigger and angrier made her dizzy for a moment as her head seemed to fill with an onslaught of information with no context.

"Beau."

She whirled, startled, and felt her heart stop at the sight of Yasha, hand hovering over the place she'd been lying down. Her face was –

It didn't matter, Beau shouldn't be able to see her.

Why not?

Seeing meant dreaming, she remembered. Dreaming meant pain. Death, even.

But she wasn't dreaming. Beau felt her mind bracing for a tilt, for the world to shift out from under her, but there was such a complete absence, a void of possibility, that it almost hurt. It was the mental equivalent of putting her foot on an extra step of a staircase, that split second where complete confidence in one reality slammed into the fact of the other.

It felt safer to shut her eyes, so she did and dug the backs of her hands into them. The darkness calmed her in its odd way, and she took two huge breaths before attempting to speak. "Wh- what the fuck. What _the fuck_ happened." Some part of her politely informed her that she should be asking what they did to her, but the little feeling couldn't seem to tell her who "they" were and she ignored it viciously.

Caduceus's voice caught her slightly less by surprise. "A whole lot happened, Beau. Can you tell me what you remember?"

His voice sounded weird, and after a second of delay she realized he was speaking Giant. That had made her feel better, she remembered. Dream Caduceus hadn't known how. But there _was_ no dream Caduceus, only real Caduceus. "I…fuck. Can you just speak in Common?"

"Of course. I thought it might help."

Beau nodded and inhaled deeply through her nose, eyes still closed. "Yeah. Yeah, I remember. Feels weird right now. I gotta…gods there's so much shit in my head that's just _wrong_ , but it still feels real."

"Does it feel like you're…going away?" Yasha's voice was steady in the telltale way she had when it was taking an effort to keep it that way.

"No. I'm okay. I mean I'm really fucking not but that part’s gone. Just…shit."

"Yasha, is she okay?" Jester's voice rang high and clear over the vast space they were in, and Beau's chest felt tight as she realized the rest of the Nein were here too in this strange space.

Yasha made a little flustered noise, which shouldn't have made Beau feel a little better but did anyway. She held up a hand without opening her eyes and called back her own reply. "I'm right here."

"That wasn't an answer," Veth called back. "We're coming over."

"Slowly," Fjord added with a grunt, and the way his voice jumped gave Beau a clear image of him reaching out to collar Veth before she could sprint.

Beau cracked open one eye just long enough to confirm and closed it again immediately. The glimpse of them activated that strange and fluttering panic again, and she did her best to breathe through it.

"Can you see?" Yasha asked. Beau nodded. A hesitant pause. "Do…you not want to?"

The hurt and confusion only seemed more obvious for Yasha's attempt to hide it, and some part of Beau’s memory shifted a little further into wakefulness before Beau viciously shoved it away. "It's too much."

It was the truth, or part of it. She wasn't ready to unpack the rest of it yet. Beau might be in emotional shock, but that just meant she needed to be even more careful with the thoughts she could hold onto - and which ones she allowed to surface.

"Okay," Yasha said softly. "Don't rush it."

There should have been a touch accompanying her words, and Beau's shoulder felt cold in the absence of it. She very clearly remembered Yasha's warmth and the thoughtless way they'd fallen in together the last time she’d been awake.

But last time she’d been awake, she could hardly even move. She could see now, and her body was mostly responding to her commands. There was no need for Yasha to reach out anymore – definitely no reason for Beau to ask her to. She’d given so much already. Beau could give her this.

Her friends approached, and hearing their footsteps on the grass reminded Beau that she still had no idea where in the hell she was. With a good sense of everyone's location, she twisted around behind her and opened her eyes to take in what she could. A long horizon stretched in front of her into the evening, but there was no sun and the breezes that touched her gently carried with them absolutely no scent.

An orb of golden light drifted past, and Beau lifted a hand to touch it. It was insubstantial but held its form as she examined it, and then it started to squirm in her fingers with a distant tingling sensation that Beau recognized as she let it go. "We're in the tower?"

Her voice came out strange, and Beau realized her body was locking up in spite of her mind being only a little uneasy and confused at best. That made sense, she figured as she closed her eyes again and turned back. Everything in her was still convinced that seeing meant death.

Cool. Sure. Not fucked up at all.

"Caleb's really sorry he had to shut off your head." Jester's voice was accompanied by the sounds of people sitting down a few feet away, giving her breathing room. "So he made this really pretty room for you to be in. There's a tent in the middle with pillows and blankets and snacks."

Ah. Right. Caleb had done this. Caleb had done a lot. Beau scrubbed a hand over her face, not sure what she was feeling but fairly certain it would take more than one conversation to get to dealing with it. "I take it you're here and keeping quiet on my account?"

Caleb's voice came, halting and strange. "Yes. I am trying not to make things worse."

She realized he was doing his best to suppress his accent and waved a hand dully. "You can talk normal, man. It doesn't matter."

"It does matter," Fjord said, gentle but firm. "If it helps, we want to do it."

Beau took another deep breath and looked up for a glimpse of the false sky before closing her eyes again. "It doesn't help anymore because I know everything is real. The feeling I had, the slipping. It's not here anymore."

Veth spoke up uncertainly. "That's good then, right? That means Caleb was right and the link is gone?"

"Yeah." She wasn't slipping but there was a definite attachment issue happening. Beau felt like she was only partially here, like one of Jester's magic paintings just before she added the last few details that made it come to life. Beau had a sinking feeling that coming to life, in this instance, was going to involve one hell of a dam break.

"Something is still wrong. What is it?" Caleb sounded like himself again, and so much of Beau wanted to open her eyes and make certain he was there. But that would be a mistake, she was certain. A number floated in her head – three. Three times.

She pushed away the thought as best as she could. "Nothing. I absolutely, one hundred percent know that none of us stabbed, magicked, beat or otherwise harmed each other."

"Yasha did kind of choke Caleb out a little over using his mind spell on you." Veth (just the once) sounded vaguely indignant, more so for the whispered "what?" when Jester (also once) shushed her. Beau filed that away for later.

"You know that," Caleb repeated slowly, "but…it still happened."

Beau pointed a finger gun in the vague direction of his voice. "Nailed it."

"I don't think I understand," Caduceus said pleasantly. (Twice, her mind told her, and she had to scramble to push away an image this time.)

Yasha's voice (zero, always) was choked with dread. "I do."

Beau's heart clenched. She had so hoped that refusing to explicitly make the connection between being stabbed by a possessed Yasha and being killed by unreal versions of her friends would keep Yasha from putting it together. She so badly didn't want to bring her into this.

"It wasn't us,” Yasha pressed. “The same way it wasn't me, with Obann."

The fake Yasha in her mind had always been cold and detached or comforting and kind. Almost exclusively, except for the third thing, but the third thing was not a possibility here now.

She just sounded heartbroken, and Beau had to risk a look. Let the dread come, let Yasha pull away - the version of her Beau heard was the same one who had been holding her and watching over her in the times she'd woken, and she deserved even a fraction of comfort in return if Beau was in the position to give it.

She opened her eyes.

It wasn't so bad at first - Yasha was looking away from the group and from her, and Beau was mostly able to block out the shapes of the others in her periphery. They were no threat. She was safe.

She reached out a cautious hand and touched Yasha's knee, a part of her marveling at how different it all seemed with sight. She focused on her fingers on the fabric of Yasha's pants, the power of her muscles and the way she could hold her own. "Hey. I never held that against you, and I'm not about to start. Veth shot me in the ass on purpose, for fucks sake. I have a scar and everything." You washed it, she thought, but kept that to herself.

"I am a very good shot, and I aim to win," Veth said primly.

Beau's heart sped up a little at the reminder of being surrounded, but even so, she smiled. It wasn't a big smile or even a very sincere one, but the motion felt better with her eyes open. Familiar, more like herself. She saw Yasha sneak a furtive glance in her direction and kept her eyes down to say the last part. "I'm going to be a little fucked up for a while I guess, but that's fine."

Her nerve ran out when Caduceus spoke up, and she closed her eyes again to fight the panic reflex. "It's understandable, Beau. That's not the same thing as fine."

"He's right," said Fjord (twice). "If you see us as your murderers every time you open your eyes, that's very far away from fine. That is firmly and deeply in 'shit is fucked' territory, and we need to work together to find some way to make this better for you."

Beau barely heard him, taking stock of the way the panic refused to go away and squaring up to face the memories pushing through with the last number. Looking at Yasha had been a mistake she didn’t regret, but now all she could remember was the last time she had seen her.

Thank the gods Yasha had gotten her first. Zero. _Zero_.

"It is fine." Beau’s words were strangled and clipped. "I get it. I - I killed you too."

Through the ringing in her ears and the sound of her breath finally leaving her all at once, Beau thought she heard Yasha shift beside her - imagined her reaching to touch her. But nothing came. _Zero_.

"Beau," Jester gasped. "You didn't. We're all here."

It took a great effort of will to keep the memory back, but she managed. "I know." Beau put all the sincerity she could fit into her words. "I do. You're here, and none of us did any of the shit I remember." She realized her hand was still on Yasha's knee and pulled it away, trying not to think about the lack of reciprocation. The numbness that had kept her going for this long was fading fast with the surrender of the last detail, and she wasn't certain what would happen when it did.

She was certain she didn't want it happening here, though.

Beau started to get to her feet, noted the strange new soreness running through her and pushed past it. She could see and she could stand. She could work with that. "I just need to take this slow," she told them. "I want to start with someplace familiar. I'm gonna just sit in my room for a while."

"Of course," said Caleb. "You have anything you want here, you need only ask."

The next part was only going to work if she allowed herself to be very, very selfish - and if Yasha was very, very kind. She knew which of those she'd put money on. "I was getting to that part." Her voice nearly cracked on the last word. She had to go, immediately. "Yasha, will you come with me for just a minute?"

The last word was lost entirely, but Yasha was already rustling to her feet. "Of course."

Beau risked opening her eyes long enough to step past her friends - alive, breathing - and head for the door. It was the longest walk she had ever taken, her heart climbing in her throat at the sound of Yasha's quiet pursuit. They wouldn't hurt her. She wouldn't hurt them. It was going to be alright.

"I'll see you all soon," she said when her fingers finally wrapped around the handle. "I promise."

"We love you, Beau," Jester called.

Beau pulled the door open and managed to stagger into the familiar hall, sucking in air and looking around form floor to banister to sitting room far below. Home. Safety. Familiarity. These were good things, and so was Yasha. She could draw strength from this. She _could_.

Yasha closed the door quietly behind them, standing so close that Beau could feel her body heat. Gods, she had asked so much of Yasha in the last few days. She had died in front of her, cried on her, depended on her for so much - and that was just all the stuff she could remember. Gods only knew what happened in the first few days or even how long she had been shut off.

All of the horror running fresh in her head was so loud, and she only had one idea to counter it in any way. One last request, and she would have something to hold onto when she broke down.

"Beau?" There was that softness, that gentle concern.

Beau closed her eyes, trembling, and realized then that she was in her undershorts and a breastband. But it shouldn't have mattered - the tower was always warm. "Sorry," she managed. "I got my sight back and I'm still fuckin'. I'll take care of myself now, just." She swallowed. "I need to ask. Will you say my name? You don't have to touch me anymore if-"

There was a split second where Beau thought that the feeling of Yasha engulfing her from behind and holding her close was part of the sensations spilling over her, tumbled in amidst the smell of fresh, loose soil on a misty spring morning, the feeling of crying yourself to sleep and waking in soft sunlight with your head on the lap of someone stroking your hair, the relief of the first raindrop's impact on cracked, dry dust - but it was real, Yasha was holding her, she had missed Beau _so much_.

"I'm sorry," she said in Beau's ear. "You told me not to stop even if you pulled away, but I was so afraid. I was so afraid it might change once you didn't need me."

Beau gripped Yasha's arm and tried to speak, but her chest heaved with a sob. Yasha didn't wait this time. She shifted her grip to pick Beau up, kissed the top of her head, and stepped out into the central chamber. “I’ve got you,” she murmured. “I’m right here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beau's a little scrambled. Give her a minute, I'm sure it's fine.


End file.
